Sen. Cory Gardner (R-Colorado) really stepped in it this time.

The chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Subcommittee on East Asia and the Pacific appeared on Morning Joe last Wednesday, and he didn’t hold back when talking about North Korean leader Kim Jong Un:

“I think most people agree that Kim Jong Un is a whack job,” Gardner said. “This is a crazed maniac at the helm of one of the world’s nuclear regimes, trying to become a nuclear regime.

Most people definitely agree. But not the government of North Korea, who responded to Gardner’s comments in a most earnest and hilarious fashion.

“On May 3, some [expletive] by the name of Cory Gardner, who sits on the U.S. Senate Foreign Relations Committee, perpetrated wicked blasphemy against our supreme dignity during an interview with NBC,” the statement on KCNA read.

And they’re just getting started.

“For a psychopath like the [expletive] Gardner, to hurl evil accusations at our highest dignity, is a serious provocation,” the Pyongyang spokesman said. “That a man mixed in with human dirt like Gardner, who has lost basic judgment and body hair, could only spell misfortune for the United States.”

This is probably the gravest of insults in North Korea, but in the U.S., it’s just plain hilarious.

Gardner, for his part, was nonplussed, saying yesterday, “The United States is not going to sit idly by while Kim Jong Un tries to hold the world hostage with his illicit arsenal of mass destruction. I’m going to continue to call on the President to fully enforce my legislation that will economically cripple the North Korean Regime, and if that gets this madman to send nonsensical insults at me so be it.”

Gardner is a vocal critic of the Norks and has called repeatedly for the end of their ballistic missile and nuclear programs. This war of words is not going to end any time soon.