As Gotham’s previous, excessively tall mayor reemerged on Friday to mark the 10th anniversary of the Groundhog Day he dropped and killed Staten Island Chuck, the news came out that the NYPD’s ridiculous K5 robot cop had quietly been rolled off of its much-hyped Times Square patrol and into an early storage-room retirement while Flaco the Owl, formerly of the Central Park Zoo, marked a full year of peripatetic meandering across Manhattan since blowing the joint by alighting on Fifth Ave. before taking off when the fuzz showed up to try and cage him.

Replacement rodents, runaway raptors and retired robots! Could all that on one day really be a coincidence?

Well, yes.

But in a city where it turns out that “Chuck,” full name Charles G. Hogg, lived on — having been secretly replaced five years earlier by a series of impersonators after he bit through the glove of Mike Bloomberg, with the mayor deflecting questions about the attack by saying terrorists could have been involved in what a tabloid headline memorably called a case of Shock and Gnaw — you can’t take anything for granted.

It’s too late to tell........

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