Consider this a dispatch from the do-as-I-say, not-as-I-do front: It’s time it’s really time to get that tax return done.

Monday is the deadline.

As you gather, I just got around to this myself. I did load TurboTax into my computer a few weeks ago, and all my W-2s, 1099s and other tax stuff are filed in a cardboard box, though not too neatly.

But before I could start my return, I had to move stuff into my new office space at home. And I’ve been doing some painting around the house, working on my child’s chameleon project … You know how it is.

Doing taxes just never moves front and center until the deadline looms. Everybody hates doing taxes. It’s one of those threads that gives us a sense of community. Looked at that way, hating taxes is good.

Of course, some people really hate taxes. In fact, there’s a whole subculture of anti-tax nuts. You wonder if they were normal people once who just lost their footing and slid down the rabbit hole to Montana, which is apparently where the biggest tax nuts end up. Do these people know they’ve become lunatics? Or is part of being crazy not knowing you’re crazy?

The other day one of them phoned me to ask whether I had ever examined the Constitution to determine whether the federal government really has the right to levy taxes.

Now, we’re trying to sell papers here, and being nice to everyone is good business as well as good manners, so I heard him out. But people like this just won’t get off the phone. They are sure absolutely positive, in fact that muttering the right incantation can make taxes vanish.

This reminds me of the time I decided to enlist in the Marines. It was 1970, and not many men were doing this. A long day of physicals at the famous induction center on Whitehall Street in New York City began with an aptitude test.

A man in his 20s stood up in front of the roomful of teen-agers sitting at small school desks. He wore a white medical outfit, so we took him to be a doctor. He explained that you were to use your No. 2 pencil to fill in the answer sheet.

“Now, most of you are draftees,” he said, “and you may be thinking that if you flunk the test we won’t take you.”

You could hear all the little gears working as this glimmer of hope dawned on the assembled inductees.

“Believe me,” the doctor said, “if there were any way to flunk this test I wouldn’t be here.”

It’s the same with taxes. If there were any legal way not to owe them, we’d all know about it. And members of Congress would be meeting overtime to straighten things out. (I didn’t go into the service, by the way, but that’s another story.)

I tried to reason with my caller the other day. “Look,” I told him, “if you want to make fighting taxes into your life’s work, go tell the IRS to jump in a lake. But you’ll spend your life being hounded. You’ll probably go to jail. And you’ll end up paying penalties and interest on top of your taxes. Why don’t you just pay up?”

He hung up in a huff convinced, I think, that I was carrying water for the world-government conspiracy.

Apparently, though, anti-tax nuts are not all dysfunctional babblers. You recently might have seen this absolutely amazing news story: The accountant for movie star Wesley Snipes and a couple of hundred other rich people was sued by the Justice Department for allegedly trying to cheat the IRS out of $36 million.

The accountant had filed returns claiming his clients didn’t owe taxes because taxes only apply to people who work for foreign-owned companies. This is based on a theory that the tax code is a hoax. The courts have held otherwise, though I suppose a conspiracy nut would say judges are biased because they’re paid with tax money.

The IRS says the country is awash in tax scams, many of which bloom in the spring as the filing deadline approaches. Typically, the con artists offer, for a fee, to let you in on a loophole “the government doesn’t want you to know about.”

Web sites for these outfits tend to be festooned with American flags and peppered with links to the Constitution, Bill of Rights and sections of the tax statutes. Taxes, in other words, are anti-American. Refusing to pay is patriotic.

A marketing guru might tell these folks they’re out of step with the times, with Americans in harm’s way in a tax-funded war most people support. But the scams must keep bringing in pigeons or they’d change their pitch.

No, there’s no alternative. Just clear a space on the table and have at it. It’s something we all do, like watching fireworks on the Fourth of July.