NEW YORK- America’s polarized political atmosphere may have led to a dirty trick being played on the conservative “Prickly City” comic.

After cartoonist Scott Stantis put a made-up URL in yesterday’s strip, someone registered that Web address and configured it so that “Prickly City” readers typing in the address would be routed to an animal-porn site.

“This tells you how ugly the political debate has become,” Stantis told E&P today. “It’s horribly embarrassing and disgusting. I’m just so sorry for anyone who looks it up.”

Stantis said it would have been “kind of clever” if the URL was routed to something like John Kerry’s campaign Web site. But “this is just foul,” he added, especially because children are among his comic’s readers.

In retrospect, Stantis wishes he had registered the fictional URL.

The URL was also in today’s comic (which couldn’t be changed in time) and originally (but no longer) in tomorrow’s and Friday’s strips. Universal Press Syndicate offered clients several options for tomorrow and Friday, including running revised versions of the strips or substitute ones. “Prickly City,” which was launched this July, appears in more than 70 newspapers.

Stantis said he knows of little reaction so far from “Prickly City” readers and newspapers — although it was one client, The Buffalo (N.Y.) News, that notified Universal of the animal-porn routing. Kathie Kerr, Universal’s director of communications, said it’s possible a number of “Prickly City” readers have contacted their papers. One person reacting was Stantis’ wife, Janien Fadich, who, according to the cartoonist, joked: “Well, at least they’re reading the strip.”

Kerr said Universal is reviewing its policy of allowing fictional URLs in features. And she said rights to a “.net” version of Stantis’ made-up URL (which ended in “.org”) have been purchased.

“This has been an interesting few days for URLs,” said Kerr, referring to how another Universal comic — Garry Trudeau’s “Doonesbury” — included Web addresses in an Oct. 11-16 sequence. Those URLs were real. The presence of URLs in both “Doonesbury” and “Prickly City” was coincidental.

Stantis — who also draws editorial cartoons for The Birmingham (Ala.) News and Copley News Service — concluded: “In the three-month history of ‘Prickly City,’ I have written about the growing coarseness of our political discussion as well as the growing crudity of the culture. … ‘Prickly City’ was a victim of both.”