Okay, this is just plain sick. Now sources are saying that the photos that the National Enquirer ran this week of Anna Nicole Smith, that they claimed were just Photoshopped recreations of what she would have looked like dead, are actually the real thing.

Despite the National Enquirer's claim that the eerie post-mortem images of Anna Nicole Smith it published were "photo re-creations based on eyewitness accounts," a source close to the magazine says they were the actual photos of the Playboy playmate's corpse lying in a Florida mortuary. "We didn't want to get anyone fired," an Enquirer operative told The Post's Braden Keil. Someone with access to the refrigerated drawers scored a big payday after pulling out Smith's pre-embalmed body and unzipping the body bag for an Enquirer photographer to hurriedly snap her bluish face.

If this is true, then I for one won't be using the Enquirer as a source for stories anymore. In fact, when I originally ran this story I had a conversation with my husband on this very subject, and I said emphatically that editors that run photos of actual dead celebrites are the ilk on the bottom of life's shoes. That's just going way over the line, in my opinion.

Labels: Anna Nicole Smith