The headline made me choke on my decaf latte with soy: “Judge says Oakland carpenter has right to work nude.”

The story of 51-year-old Percy Honnibal hit the newswires this week. (And why wouldn’t it? Nothing else seemed to be going on.) Evidently, Percy was arrested last year when he was caught building cabinetry in the buff at a client’s home.

Seems the intrepid carpenter had been busted three times previously while working sans coveralls (and everything else, apparently) in Berkeley, Calif., where there is a ban on public nudity.

In Oakland, there is no such ban. Since the judge determined that Honnibal was not acting lewdly or for sexual gratification – rather, for practical reasons, such as not wanting to get his clothes dirty and having better “range of motion” on the job – he was let go.

“Oh, this is GREAT!” I said to myself. “This is all the ammo he’ll need!”

I wadded the paper up in disgust.

My husband, you see, is a carpenter who, in his home life, is coolly indifferent to the concept of clothing.

On more than one occasion, I have had to body block him from bounding out to the porch in his skivvies to get the mail. (We have a lot of female walkers in our neighborhood. Some of them may have heart conditions.)

In our pre-empty nest days, he’d think nothing of waltzing into the kitchen, wearing only a bath towel, and greeting our kids’ friends with a hardy, “What’s happenin’?” (It’s a wonder no one ever called Child Protective Services.) Truth be told, that was the reason we could never invite a foreign exchange student into our home all those years. What with all the different customs and beliefs, we were sure to cause an international incident.

He is so fond of the towel-only look, he’ll often attend to the barbecue grill or water the tomatoes wearing nothing but terry cloth (a secret only our next-door neighbors shared until now).

If he had his way, I’m sure he’d perform all routine household maintenance chores in the buff or, at least, in a super-absorbent, 100 percent Egyptian cotton, ultra-plush bath sheet.

Of course, he would never dream of wearing his birthday suit to a client’s home on, say, a kitchen remodel. In other people’s houses, he is modestly clothed in work pants and holey T-shirts, which I threaten to throw in the trash on a monthly basis.

“Those are WORK shirts!” he admonishes me. “There are WORK shirts and GOING OUT shirts. When a GOING OUT shirt gets a stain or a hole, I take it out of the rotation and put it in with the WORK SHIRTS. There it lives in the WORK SHIRT rotation until rendered unwearable, at which point, it becomes a rag. How many times :?”

Still, I wondered what he’d do if introduced to the notion of clothes-free carpentry. And how I could ever live with the stress of it all. I mean, I already nag him constantly about wearing his protective glasses. Imagine the additional safety concerns! Not to mention our insurance rates!

And since I’m the official splinter remover in the family (I’m exceptionally skilled with a pair of tweezers, if I do say so myself), I decided he must never, EVER read about one Mr. Percy Honnibal of Oakland, Calif.

I pitched the paper in the trash, checked the local public nudity laws, just for good measure, and thanked heaven winter is coming.