Talk about roadkill.

It wasn’t just the young bear that became roadkill after being hit by a car in upstate New York.

Robert F. Kennedy Jr. became roadkill as well — at least his bizarre campaign for president did — after it was revealed that he scooped up the dead bear and in a loutish college-like prank, dumped the body  along with an old bike in Central Park in Manhattan.

Kennedy, son of Robert F. Kennedy and nephew of President John F. Kennedy, was 60 years old at the time.

It happened 10 years ago when bike accidents were in the news after several people had been killed in such accidents in Central Park. It was supposed to be a joke.

Central Park strollers were supposed to come across the dead bear, which they did, and assume that the bear had either been killed riding the bike or was hit by it. Get it?

The weird story, which is riddled with holes, only came to light when Kennedy, running for president as a third-party candidate, talked about it in a video made public last week prior to publication of a hit piece in the New Yorker.

The story will do to Kennedy’s failing candidacy what a similar one did to the national political ambitions of South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem, who wrote about shooting her dog because it would not hunt pheasant but killed a neighbor’s chickens. She hasn’t been heard from since.

This story will end Kennedy’s impossible presidential ambitions, such as they are. It also adds another weird tale to the Kennedy family legacy, such as it is.

Kennedy did not shoot the young bear. He said in the video he posted, with Roseanne Barr as his enraptured audience, that he came across the bear after a woman driving through Hudson Valley in a van hit and killed it.

While an ordinary man would have pulled the dead bear to the side of the road and called wildlife authorities, Kennedy picked up the bloody bear, and put it in his van “because I was going to skin the bear.”

He then posed for a picture with the dead bear biting his hand.

“It was in very good condition, and I was going to put the meat in my refrigerator,” he said. Unsaid was the possibility that it would also save a trip to the meat counter at the local supermarket.

Kennedy is alleged to have eaten a barbecued dog, which he denies and claims it was a goat in during a trip to Patagonia, so a bear cub would have been a delicacy.

Kennedy, with the bear in the back, apparently lost track of time during his planned falconry outing, a practice where birds of prey are trained to hunt small animals, like rabbits and squirrels.

So, instead of heading to his home in Westchester County to skin the bear and store the meat in the refrigerator, he drove into the city for dinner with friends at Peter Lugar Steak House where you can get a steak for $100.

Then he realized that he had to get to the airport, but the bear was still in his van, and he didn’t have time to go home.

“I didn’t want to leave the bear in the car because that would have been bad,” Kennedy said.

While his buddies were drinking, and he was not, Kennedy, in a plan that a crazed Kramer in a Seinfeld episode would have loved, suggested dumping the bear in Central Park “and we’ll make it look like he got hit by a bike.”

“Everybody thought it was a great idea,” Kennedy said which, if you were drunk, made a lot of sense.

“So, we did that, and we thought it would be amusing for whoever found it or something,” Kennedy said.

People did find it, and it was not amusing.

For Kennedy’s political career, it is like the end in the classic movie “The Great Lebowski” when The Dude (Jeff Bridges) is at the bar searching for the meaning of it all. He is joined by The Stranger (a wizened Sam Elliot) who explains:

“A wiser fella than me once said, sometimes you eat the bear and sometimes, well, the bear eats you.”

Peter Lucas is a veteran political reporter. Email him at: peter.lucas@bostonherald.com