There’s a bizarre mystery unfolding in Culpeper, and the sheriff is not working too hard to investigate. That’s not to denigrate the sheriff’s office — they’re legitimately baffled by what’s going on — but the sheriff and the rest of the community seem more amused than anything.

The mystery is this: Someone left a golden toilet in front of the county’s administration building. According to County Sheriff Tim Chilton, it all started with a phone call.

“A citizen that called, he actually works for the county, and called me and said, ‘Hey, we have a golden toilet sitting on our county administration lawn. What do we do with it?’ And I’m like, what are you even talking about?”

And almost immediately after that, the laughs started.

“So he takes a picture, sends it to me, and of course, the rest is history,” said Chilton. “There’s the old golden, golden throne sitting there, waiting on whatever. But folks were stopping and taking pictures with it.”

Chilton said they’re not going to “investigate” the toilet or it’s origins, but they have moved it out of the way, to a place where it’s rightful owner can claim it. Perhaps a more important question to the sheriff than ‘Where does it come from?’ is, ‘What to do with it now?’ and for that, the community has it’s own ideas.

“People want to make it into a shrine, like a bird bath, they want to make it into a place for bird seed,” said Chilton. “They want to they want to us to put a fountain in it. And then they want to have the one lady says, let’s do a segment everybody that wants to talk a bunch of junk about the county, they have to sit on the golden throne and talk about it. And they’re going to call it duty calls.”

The sheriff is taking it all in stride and with humor. He says that the “golden throne” is not detracting from his police duties (no pun intended), but has really done well for the department’s social media.