As gang members, guns, drugs, and millions of unvetted foreign nationals pour across America’s southern border, our northern border is keeping at bay the real danger to our republic: peanut butter. 

My wife is fond of referring to herself with the words Billy Crystal’s character uses to describe co-star Meg Ryan’s in “When Harry Met Sally.” She’s “high maintenance but thinks she’s low maintenance.”

While I disagree, she does miss some items from her birthplace in the Great White North that take effort to import. One taste of home is Kraft Peanut Butter, which she finds preferable to our Skippy and Jif.

To meet this craving, her mother has become a mule, shipping jars every six months or so. I’m not sure if she’ll face any charges, but her recent care package caught the eagle eye of U.S. Customs and Border Protection.

Peanut butter is not listed in the prohibited imported food items on the CPB’s website, but you can never be too careful when dealing with Canadians, apparently. They might hide a hockey puck in there; you could break a tooth.

So, this time when the jars arrived, we discovered our ever-vigilant sentinels of freedom had slashed the covers open with a box cutter — rather than unscrew them like humans — and dug into the brown nut goop in search of contraband.

Discovering no danger, they sealed the jars with bright green tape branded with the government’s logo and allowed them to continue on their way to the naturalized American citizen they were addressed to, one hungering for a PB&J cobbled together with a product declared both “smooth” in English and “crémeux” in French.

The foreign language probably tipped off the border protectors from the get-go. What real American would choose such a product over good, old-fashioned Freedom Butter? The heart swells with patriotic pride even as the stomach growls.

The contents are now inedible, of course, but they’ve been confirmed as safe. I can’t tell you how relieved I am that my government is protecting me from all threats foreign and domestic. 

The jam my wife makes now has to go it alone, but the strawberries she uses are 100 percent American, and never seemed comfortable being smeared together with illegal alien spread, anyway.

Truth be told — and just between us, dear readers — I watched enough of “The Honeymooners” to suspect my mother-in-law was up to something. She fits the Department of Homeland Security’s profile of a terrorist so well, it’s almost eerie.

Scotch-English, in her 70s, and the wife of a pastor who reads the Bible and believes it’s the word of God, she’s known to say the word “Jesus” as a name, not a curse word. That’s the exact sort of person who we’re told can be radicalized.

Looking at the defiled label on the jar, I also note that it features two cartoon bears with grins that can only be described as sinister. Named “Smoothy” and “Crunchy,” they’re indistinguishable except for their red and green bow ties.

Red, of course, is the color of Marxism, and green of Marxists hiding under cover of the radical environmentalist movement. Would that Senator McCarthy, late Republican of Wisconsin, were alive to haul Smoothy and Crunchy before the House Un-American Activities Committee to answer for their possible sedition.

Much is made of the flow of drugs across the southern border, and it rated a headline when, for example, CBP’s Laredo field office captured 588 pounds of fentanyl last year, a mere fraction of what they miss.

Yet despite the government’s failure to stem the flow from Mexico, and with drug overdoses topping 100,000 a year, we can feel good about the peanut butter-related fatalities: Zero so far in fiscal 2022.

Smoothy and Crunchy were stopped cold at the 49th Parallel by a government that cares enough — and is big enough — to protect citizens from peanut butter shipped by little old ladies in the terrorist wonderland called Canada. So the next time someone tells you we have a problem at our borders, you can tell them that they’re just plain nuts.