As some reporters know only too well, The Hill‘s Managing Editor Bob Cusack is something of a professional prankster. Well, halleluja, the tables have finally turned. Over the weekend, Cusack got a taste of his own medicine when, while dining at the Greene Turtle in Fairfax, Va., a young boy approached and asked for his autograph.

Turns out it was the 10-year-old son of Cusack’s colleague, Pete Kasperowicz, a reporter for the publication’s Floor Action Blog, who had put his son up to the prank. Cusack bought it. “Punk’d @PeteKTheHill convinced his son to come up to me at restaurant and say, ‘Can I get your autograph?’ I was speechless,” Cusack wrote on Twitter.

While it’s not the dirtiest prank we can imagine — Cusack deserves much worse — it is admirable that he fell for it, even temporarily. But beware. Little does Kasperowicz know that Cusack has already begun plotting. “I have to get him back,” he told FishbowlDC. All we can say, Pete, is watch your back. And even then you won’t see it coming.

To refresh your memories on what Cusack is capable of, back in December, 2009, Ian Swanson, The Hill‘s News Editor, innocently spilled coffee on his computer and destroyed it. So Cusack went ahead with his devil’s work and wrote him phony emails, pretending to be a company techy. He insisted that Swanson appear before staff and speak on the dangers of coffee and computers. Swanson agreed to it, before ultimately realizing Cusack was the culprit.

It was only a matter of time.

You can only have so much tiger blood coursing through your veins until it spills into Washington culture and onto Capitol Hill. Serious “winning” happened today when Rep. Lynn Woolsey (D-Calif.) was speaking on the House floor and referred to Rolling Stone‘s Michael Hastings‘ comparison of David Petraeus to actor Charlie Sheen. Duh. It’s not hard to see the resemblance of the drug-addled actor to the commander of the U.S. and NATO forces in Afghanistan. Woolsey complained about the supposed July withdrawal of troops and wondered if and how that was going to happen.

Hastings made the comparison at a briefing Tuesday held by the Congressional Progressive Caucus Peace and Security Task Force. He referenced Sheen’s press strategy, as in the more the better. “General Petraeus is giving us the Charlie Sheen counter-insurgency strategy, which is to give exclusive interviews to every major network, and to keep saying ‘we’re winning’ and hope the public actually agrees with you,” The Hill’s Pete Kasperowicz reported today. Like Hasting, The Hill cashed in on Sheen’s nationwide spark and used his name in the headline: “Petraeus accused of ‘Charlie Sheen strategy’ on Afghanistan war.”

Read the full story here.