Who’d pay to watch THIS fight club? With toe-curling embarrassment, our playground politicos are threatening to punch each others’ lights out – now DAVID MARCUS delivers a knockout blow to the fools who run our lives

Worst fight club ever.

On Tuesday, the threat of fisticuffs was displayed in both Houses of our August Congress.

In the end, the only black eye was the institution itself.

The lower card took place in the upper body. Oklahoma Sen. Markwayne Mullin accused an equally intimidating Teamsters president, Sean O’Brien, of defaming him in a tweet.

So of course, in the ultimate “Sir, this is a Wendy’s” moment, Mullin challenged O’Brien to a bare-knuckle brawl in the middle of a Senate hearing.

‘Would you like to run your mouth? We can be two consenting adults. We can finish it here,” threatened Mullin, who – believe it or not – is a former MMA fighter.

‘Okay, that’s fine. Perfect,” O’Brien snapped back, like a character in a Scorsese picture.

Then – a more exciting dialogue.

“Stand up,” Mullin said.

“Stand up straight, big fella,” O’Brien replied.

Who writes this rubbish?

Mullin shot out of his chair. I have no doubt that visions of viral videos and internet power danced through his mind.

Fortunately, referee Bernie Sanders, chairman of the committee, had seen enough.

‘Sit down!’ he warned. “You’re a United States Senator!”

Indeed he is.

For now.

Meanwhile, the main event took place in the House of Representatives.

In the right corner sat former Republican House leader Kevin McCarthy, who lost his speaker’s belt last month.

And in the far right corner is Tim Burchett of Tennessee, one of eight Republicans behind the knockout vote that ousted McCarthy from power.

Burchett accused McCarthy of elbowing him from behind — landing a “clean shot to the kidneys” — while speaking to an NPR reporter.

Burchett lunged forward, a chase ensued and sharp verbal punches were thrown.

“Why did you walk behind me and elbow me in the back?”

The former speaker replied: “I didn’t elbow you in the back.”

“You don’t have the guts, you did that,” Burchett wailed, to which any self-respecting schoolyard bully would have responded: na-na na-na boo-boo.

“This is wild,” Matt Gaetz, once the Florida instigator, barked from the sidelines. “McCarthy resorts to pushing people in the hallways. What a weak, pathetic shell of a man.”

What in God’s name is going on with these people? It’s tempting to set these tough guys aside as isolated incidents of idiocy, but they betray a much deeper dysfunction that Americans are rightly outraged about.

Take normally stable Republican Rep. James Comer, who also lost to Democrat Jared Moskowitz in a hearing on Tuesday.

“You look like a Smurf,” Comer shouted at Moskowitz, whose hair actually looks more like a troll’s.

“Gargamel was very angry today,” Moskowitz later joked on Twitter – a rather witty reference to the evil Smurf-eating cartoon monster.

Well played, Congressman Smurf.

Look – this is a complete joke and that’s the problem, isn’t it?

When duly elected members of Congress aren’t arguing like toddlers, they’re pulling fire alarms or being caught on movie theater surveillance cameras smoking fumes and groping their dates.

On Wednesday, it was revealed that Squad Congresswoman Rashida Tlaib, who has already been convicted by the House of Representatives for spreading pro-Hamas propaganda, is reportedly a member of a secretive social media group that regularly praises terrorists.

Honestly, no one is the least bit surprised at this point.

Across town, the White House is not doing much better.

Our commander in chief reportedly called Obama’s ex-political guru a “dick” after David Axelrod suggested our sleepy old president would withdraw from the 2024 race.

Biden’s granddaughter said Axelrod was a “jerk,” which is a bit more polite.

And this week, the American public was treated to the first images of that bag of cocaine – courtesy of a DailyMail.com exclusive – found in the seat of the executive branch in July.

Mind you, we still have no idea who the Coke belonged to. Maybe it was the same person who leaked the Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision? The only thing that is certain is that we will never know.

This CVS receipt of horrible things just keeps flowing into the garbage register.

It feels like we’re just a few Twitter insults away from an 1865 Preston Brooks-style caning of abolitionist Charles Sumner in the Senate well.

And we all know what happened four years after that.

Civil war!

What will we face in four years from today?

Yes, there has always been bad behavior from the narcissists prowling the halls of federal power, but in reality, this is too much.

Can any right-thinking person look at the current trajectory of American politics and see anything other than a nosedive into an ugly brawl?

On Tuesday, after the testosterone waning, Senator Markwayne Mullin took to a podcast to set the record straight — he had no regrets.

“By the way, I’m not afraid to bite,” Mullin told the podcast host unprompted. ‘In a fight I’m going to bite. I’ll do anything, I mean, I’m not above it.”

No, Senator. You certainly aren’t.