Conservatives feared Jimmy Kimmel would treat President Barack Obama as most of his peers do at last month’s White House Correspondents’ Dinner – with the proverbial kid gloves.

Instead, Kimmel mocked the Left, the Right and the President in a well received political roast.

Turns out Kimmel nearly sabotaged his act with a joke aimed squarely at the family of Rick Santorum. Some last-minute advice from ABC News’ Jake Tapper, one of a handful of modern journalists willing to buck ideology to tell the truth, saved Kimmel from dropping the horrendously offensive gag in the Nation’s Capital.

Here’s the joke:

Newt Gingrich’s campaign is so dead Mitt Romney wants to baptize it and Rick Santorum wants to put it in a jar and show it to his kids.

Kimmel recalled the series of events that led up to spiking the joke on “The Howard Stern Show” on SiriusXM.

Santorum’s wife Karen gave birth to Gabriel Michael Santorum in 1996, but the boy lived for only two hours.