It may be a case of a brass-knuckled political operative losing his cool and senses. Or it just might be a devilish ploy to keep Governor Spitzer’s problems on the front pages of newspapers throughout the state.

Either way, it’s the latest and strangest explosion to rock Albany.

Yesterday, a lawyer representing Mr. Spitzer’s 83-year-old father, real estate developer Bernard Spitzer, accused Roger Stone, a feared Republican consultant, of calling up his apartment earlier this month and leaving a menacing phone message.

“This is a message for Bernard Spitzer,” the anonymous caller says, according to a recording posted on the Daily News’s Web site.

“You will be subpoenaed to testify before the Senate Committee on Investigations on your shady campaign loans. You will be compelled by the Senate sergeant at arms. If you resist the subpoena, you will be arrested and brought to Albany. And there is not a g— thing your phony, psycho piece-of-s— son can do about it. Bernie, your phony loans are about to catch up with you. You will be forced to tell the truth, and the fact that your son’s a pathological liar will be known to all,” the caller says in an angry but not out-of-control tone.

The accusation by Mr. Spitzer’s lawyer against Mr. Stone was outlined in a letter sent yesterday to a Republican state senator, George Winner, the chairman of the Committee on Investigations and Government Operations.

Mr. Winner last month urged the Elections Committee to investigate a $4.3 million personal bank loan Mr. Spitzer took out during his 1994 unsuccessful race for attorney general that was paid back with money he received from his father.

During the 1998 race, facing more questions about the financing of his second campaign, Mr. Spitzer acknowledged that he lied about how he paid back the 1994 loan.

The scandal almost cost him the election, but over the years it receded from public view until Republicans earlier this year sought to breathe life into the story in an effort to cast Mr. Spitzer as an unethical hypocrite. The governor has called on lawmakers to pass stricter campaign finance laws and has questioned the ethics of Senate Republicans.

In a letter sent to Mr. Winner, Bernard Spitzer’s lawyer, Jeffrey Moerdler, said investigators at the firm Kroll Associates traced the August 6 call back to Mr. Stone’s Central Park South apartment. The letter was published on the Web site of the Times Union of Albany.

Mr. Moerdler also sent a CD recording of the message, along with a sample of Mr. Stone’s voice from a broadcast interview to demonstrate the similarity between the two sounds.

Mr. Stone in an interview denied having left the message, saying he was attending the Broadway play “Frost/Nixon” that evening when the call was supposedly made.

“I have been accused of a lot of things but being dumb is not one of them,” Mr. Stone said.

He said “hostile” people have access to his apartment and accused the governor of perpetrating a dirty trick.

The news left Albany observers wondering whether the phone message was a mark of lunacy or a cunning dirty trick masquerading as lunacy. It may not look good for Senate Republicans to be associated with a man caught on tape taunting the governor’s aging father, a prominent New York philanthropist. But Mr. Spitzer, who is trying to recover from the state police scandal, likely is not eager to have attention refocused on his early campaign finance schemes.

“The loan story is revived and Stone gets a black eye. Stone can live with a black eye but the governor doesn’t need another bad story,” a veteran Democratic political consultant, Hank Sheinkopf, said in an interview. “Some people say bad things about Roger Stone, but he doesn’t care. Stone can’t be hurt, but the governor can. It’s not the wackiest theory I ever heard.”

A protégé of President Nixon who developed attack strategies for the campaigns of President Reagan, the first President Bush, Senator Dole, and other Republicans, Mr. Stone has been advising state Senate Republicans on how to beat back the effort Mr. Spitzer and the Democrats to oust them from power.

In July, Mr. Stone was negotiating the financial terms of his arrangement with Republicans.

Mr. Stone, whose behind the scene tactics and protest organizing are believed to have given Mr. Bush an edge over Vice President Gore in the 2000 Florida recount controversy, has also worked outside the Republican Party, advising the 2004 presidential campaign of the Reverend Al Sharpton and the unsuccessful effort to unseat Governor Pataki in 2002 by a billionaire Independence Party candidate, Thomas Golisano.

He also has lent his skills to foreign candidates and governments overseas.

A spokesman for Mr. Spitzer declined to comment.