As “rubico” himself so memorably said, “if this sh*t ever got to the FBI I was f***ed.” With today’s news, I think we can safely say that the sh*t has indeed gotten to the FBI.

Worst party evah:

A person who identified himself as a witness tells 10 News that agents with the FBI served a federal search warrant at the Fort Sanders residence of David Kernell early Sunday morning. Kernell lives in the Commons apartment complex at 1115 Highland Ave…

A Department of Justice spokesperson confirmed there has been “investigatory activity” in Knoxville regarding the Palin case, but she said there are no publicly available search warrants, and no charges have been filed.

A separate law enforcement source confirmed to 10 News that a search warrant was served on Kernell’s apartment.

According to the witness, several agents arrived at The Commons of Knoxville around midnight.

They presented their badges upon entering Kernell’s apartment, where several students were having a party, and took down their names.

The witness tells us they asked him and those who did not live in the unit to go outside. He believes the investigators took about 1.5 to 2 hours taking pictures of everything inside the apartment.

What were they doing serving a search warrant circa 1 a.m. on Sunday morning? Just maximizing the embarrassment by crashing this kid’s party, a sort of buzzkill di tutti buzzkills? Kind of jerky — yet kind of awesome.

Needless to say, continue to exercise caution; just because they think he might have evidence doesn’t necessarily means he’s the suspect. But as the Jawas point out, if this is all a coincidence or a case of mistaken identity, it’s a pretty spectacular one. Exit quotation: “David Kernell excelled at chess while at Germantown High School and won the 2004 Tennessee Open Scholastic Chess Championship. Internet searches show someone uses the handle rubico on chess Web sites. In addition, an inactive blog, with one post dated May 2004, included rubico as a username. Its author identified himself as a chess player from Memphis named David.”