Well, it turns out we wasted all of our cheap quips and cheaper one-liners on the wrong lawyer, didn’t we? Rusty Hardin seemed like such an easy target. For one thing, he has a bully as a client, a guy who may go down as one of the least-liked great athletes in the history of American sports.

And beyond that, Roger Clemens looked like he’d served his lawyer a hanging slider of a case. Hardin has won an awful lot of high-profile trials. He got Calvin Murphy out of a pot of boiling water once. He took down the late model/grifter Anna Nicole Smith, bludgeoning her so soundly on a witness stand that her feeble response to him — “Screw you, Rusty” — became his calling card in Houston and everywhere else he unbuckled his briefcase. But this case?

This case was a loser. The government had Roger Clemens in its crosshairs, and time and again across the past few years we were told by bright legal minds everywhere that when the government comes at you like this, you’d better duck. Hardin endured one Matlock joke after another. It sure looked, and sounded, like the government was Clemens in this case and Clemens was Mario Mendoza.

Everyone said so.

Then yesterday, in about 15 seconds, the United States government, represented by lawyers you wouldn’t want to help you fix a parking ticket, took a great big pile of American taxpayer money, threw it in a huge bin, and lit it on fire. Millions of our dollars, up in smoke like a high school football bonfire, the U.S. attorneys admonished by the court, humiliated on one of the most public stages in the history of jurisprudence.

And there went ol’ Rusty, laughing all the way to a mistrial.

Honestly, you thought the way Derek Jeter’s day went Saturday couldn’t have been invented by a Hollywood hack? Try yesterday’s performance by the prosecution in United States v. Clemens, when they tried the kind of trick that would’ve gotten a script writer thrown off the soundstage at “L.A. Law,” “The Practice,” “Ally McBeal” or any other fictional courtroom show.

Actually, the prosecution had already started to wear thin on the nerves of the judge, Reggie Walton, by defying his orders and mentioning that three of Clemens teammates had admitted to using HGH. Walton had already said that would be off-limits for now; U.S. Attorney Stephen Durham snuck that information into his opening statement anyway.

Then, yesterday, the final straw: The government lawyers showing tape of U.S. Rep. Elijah Cummings talking about the testimony of Laura Pettitte, Andy’s wife. This was another brazen attempt to circumvent the judge’s pre-trial instructions. And this time Walton did the only thing he could do. But not before giving Durham and the other members of the Marcia Clark All-Stars a humiliating — and on-the-mark — lecture.

“I think that a first-year law student would know that you can’t bolster the credibility of one witness with clearly inadmissible evidence,” the judge said.

Perfect. Just perfect. We can argue from here to the 12th of never whether this trial should have ever happened in the first place but the fact is this: Once the government decided this was a worthy case, it had to proceed, had to prosecute, had to make Clemens answer for allegedly perjuring himself before Congress. When it showed up for work, it would’ve been nice to know that the United States of America had something of a clue what it was doing. And wasn’t sending Marv Throneberry out there to try the case.

The judge will wait until September to figure out where this goes, which may or may not be enough time on the disabled list for the United States of America to recover from a third-degree brain cramp. But will be more than enough time to gather another pile of our money, throw it in another barbecue pit, and decide whether to use gasoline or kerosene to light it on fire all over again. Good times.

michael.vaccaro@nypost.com