Judith Miller said goodbye to the readers of the New York Times today — on the letters page, of all places, with the heading “To the Editor,” though clearly he knew she was leaving. I guess at that point the management figured she was a civilian and could use the same public forum everyone else does when airing her complaints about the paper and its treatment of her. Better that than have her parading around the entrance with a sandwich board and a bullhorn, screaming about a conspiracy.

Though I imagine her swan song was more judiciously edited than, say, her reporting on WMD in Iraq, it still sounded more like Edith Piaf (“Non, je ne rerette rien”) than Terrell Owens’ now-what-am-gonna-do-for-work apology. I was struck by this line in the third graf: “I am honored to have been part of this extraordinary newspaper and proud of my accomplishments here – a Pulitzer, a DuPont, an Emmy and other awards – but sad to leave my professional home.”

Golly, Judy, didn’t you read the excerpt from Maureen Dowd’s book in the Times magazine a few weeks back? Men don’t like it when you go bragging about your awards! This was echoed in Ariel Levy’s slavish, star-struck profile of Dowd in New York magazine when Mo’s good friend Michi Kakutani calls, after winning her own Pulitzer, to moan, “Now I’ll never get a date!”

Maybe Miller stopped reading Dowd after the latter slagged her in print a few weeks back, and maybe they weren’t all that close in the first place. Still, I think there must be a hilarious sitcom in there somewhere: Mo, Michi and Allessandra as three footloose girls in the city who just can’t get a date on Saturday night because of all those awards and honors and stuff, and Judy could be the old maid who lives downstairs who’s always calling to tell them to keep it down. Call it Paper Girls, or something. Roll it out on the WB and see what happens.

Personally, I like the idea of term limits for all the Times’s writers.