Making fun of the Washington Times has always been like shooting fish in a barrel, but Patrick Gavin at Fishbowl DC notes that soon we may not have the Times to kick around anymore, or train our house pets on.

Founded by the Reverend Sun Myung Moon in 1982, the paper has long bled money, losing perhaps over $2 billion during its publishing run while being kept alive by cash infusions from Moon’s Unification Church. It seems, however, that money difficulties are now compounded by newsroom problems, with prominent staffers jumping ship and tell-alls on the way.

Fishbowl notes that, “two former W. Timers are working on pieces that will open the curtain on what takes place behind the scenes at the Washington Times,” revealing, we suspect, depraved cult rituals, relentless browbeating, and bad coffee. The pieces include a memoir by long-time Times writer George Archibald and a potential series of articles by the recent victim of the Times’ paranoid blog policy, Robert Redding, who now serves as Communications Director for mayoral candidate Michael Brown. Both writers are being cryptic about the dirt they’ve got, but neither appears likely to cast the Times as a bastion of racial tolerance and blissful employer-employee relations.

It seems probable that the Times will receive a good sullying this year, but it’s not clear that these guys have the stuff to bring down Moon’s baby. Which we can live with. After all we’d miss the psychotic, Beckett-like stream of non sequiturs that is a Tom Knott column, complete with mysterious pronouncements like, “A project as cumbersome as the building of a ballpark in a city with a rich history of mismanagement, graft and waste is almost predestined to come up against unforeseen forces.” I don’t know what this means, but it’s freaking me out.