While hawking his sneakers up in Albany on Monday, Stephon Marbury managed to do something that he’s getting really good at, right along with leading the Knicks into the lottery on a yearly basis.

He inserted one of those Starbury models in his mouth, royally embarrassing the Knicks.

Yet again.

How’s that possible, you ask, when the Knicks kind of are a walking embarrassment to begin with?

Marbury defended Michael Vick, of all people.

That’s hard to top, if not virtually impossible, even during an offseason in which Marbury went on a Sunday night sports show and acted so dopey that Knicks executives and players were said to be mortified by his bizarre behavior.

It’s one thing to come across in an interview as totally loopy, and Marbury did a brilliant job of that during his nine minutes of babbling with NBC’s Bruce Beck last month. But it’s quite another thing to be taking up the case for Vick, something no half-sane person would be caught dead doing.

Either you’re just plain stupid or you’re ignorant of the facts that are going to send the Falcons quarterback to federal prison for what we can only hope is an eternity. And if somebody wants to throw away the key to Vick’s cell while they’re at it, it wouldn’t bother us in the least. Marbury came across as stupid and ignorant when he called dogfighting a sport and compared it to hunting.

“I think it’s tough,” Marbury said to an Albany TV station. “I think, you know, we don’t say anything about people who shoot deer or shoot other animals. You know, from what I hear, dogfighting is a sport. It’s just behind closed doors.”

Maybe Marbury doesn’t know that hunting deer, along with other animals, is a legal activity, but engaging in the heinous acts perpetrated by Vick and his degenerate cronies most certainly is not. Dogfighting is nothing more than a sick crime.

If it’s just a case of ignorance on Marbury’s part, it’s certainly not a first. It’s par for the warped course he lives on, if you think back to the day when he called himself the best point guard in the NBA. Knicks fans are still waiting for the day he’s the best in his own backyard, which can only start to happen when Jason Kidd retires. Even then, we’re not so sure Marbury has it in him.

Right now, the only thing he does better than Kidd is selling discount sneakers and occasionally making people in his organization turn a deep shade of red. He says plenty of funny stuff, even when he’s not on camera wonderfully miscast as some kind of TV show host, such as earlier this summer when he said that when he’s done playing for the Knicks, he’s heading to Italy to play there. He reportedly went on to compare himself to David Beckham. Seriously.

You rolled your eyes at that one and thought, “typical Steph.” But when Marbury starts defending Michael Vick on camera, for all the world to see, Jim Dolan can’t like that any more than David Stern can. Marbury should have done what he almost always does when he doesn’t like a question.

“Next question,” he says.

When the Vick matter came up in Albany, it was the perfect time for that answer. Unfortunately for the Garden, Marbury didn’t stop with his first remark. He again took up Vick’s cause later in the interview, saying, “I think it’s tough that we build Michael Vick up and then we break him down. I think he’s one of the superb athletes, and he’s a good human being. I just think that he fell into a bad situation.”

Superb athlete? Unquestionably.

Good human being? Who’s kidding who?