If you’ve never seen Rambo, Stallone rigs up sharp, wooden stakes in various ways to ventilate his redneck pursuers. It’s only a movie, so it’s OK to cheer the hero. The blood is fake.

Not so much in real life. When 4th District Judge Lynn Davis leaned over the bench and asked Rukowski what the heck he was thinking, Rukowski replied that he had only been “fooling around” and “not thinking correctly.” Give Rukowski credit. This is the right thing to say to a judge who is about to slap you of a third-degree felony. Rukowski went on to plead guilty to reckless endangerment, a class A misdemeanor. His pal, Kai Christensen, hasn’t figured out what to say yet.

But here’s what gets me: Rukowski’s lawyer, Richard Gale, told the judge with a straight face that the booby-traps were not intended to hurt anyone. The men were just playing “military games” when they built defenses for their shelter, Gale said. “They didn’t think about how serious the consequences could be.”

Are you kidding? Thinking about consequences is precisely the point of booby-trap design. If a person trips Wire A, he gets stabbed by Spike B. The process of building a booby-trap requires the envisioning of consequences; it is not an afterthought. There’s got to be a lawyer joke in here somewhere.