Philadelphia ? It was just a half-eaten waffle, left Monday on the counter of a diner in Scranton, Pa.

But it was Barack Obama’s half-eaten waffle, and that gave the waitress the idea to smuggle it away as a souvenir.

Within a day, it had found its way to eBay, offered to the highest bidder. Up and up it went – $76 … $177.50 … $10,100. Was this serious? Was it a joke? Who could say?

A couple of Web sites picked up on it. The Scranton Times-Tribune did a story. CNN ran a piece. Somehow, it even worked its way to the Kalgoorlie Golden Mail in the desert of western Australia.

It was all too funny, a tale of celebrity-driven culture whipped through the blogosphere.

But one person wasn’t laughing.

“I felt it wasn’t right,” said Charles LeStrange, proprietor of the Glider Diner, a classic, steel-box diner with red stripes across the street from Scranton High School.

“The remains of the breakfast were wrapped up and given to a patron,” LeStrange said Friday. “I think they must have had an agreement between them. … Maybe (in putting it on eBay) they just wanted to see what would happen.”

An Inquirer reporter traveling with Obama the day before the Pennsylvania primary was standing across the counter when the Illinois senator chowed down. The syrup-soaked waffle that appeared in the eBay photo, along with a bitten-into sausage, certainly bore a striking resemblance to what Obama left behind.

LeStrange asked that the breakfast be pulled off eBay, which has a policy against auctioning off perishable food.

The waitress and the patron were both lying low at week’s end, and neither could be reached for comment.

So the fate of Obama’s breakfast is unknown.