-- From Times staff reporter Amy Harris:

It was the case of the severed finger that wasn't.

Blake Manning thought his dog Sam had bitten off more than he could chew on Sunday when the Chihuahua-mix discovered what Manning thought was the gnarled, blackened remnants of a human finger at the Queen Anne Playfields.

Manning, a 35-year-old Queen Anne resident, blogged about the gruesome discovery and posted photos of the blackened object. He wrote that he was considering filing a lawsuit for $10,000 for the emotional distress he was put through by finding the severed digit.

"I was horrified, but I was not perplexed," Manning wrote, tongue in cheek, on his blog. "I knew immediately where the finger had come from."

According to his blog, Manning wondered if Sam had happened upon the finger lost by an 18-year-old man during a Fourth of July fireworks mishap. The Seattle Fire Department said the man lost a finger and suffered other injuries when a home-made firework blew up in his hand.

Manning wrapped the object in a plastic bag and took it home, where he put it in his freezer. "I wanted to hang onto it so I could arrange it return it to the boy as a keepsake," Manning said.

There was just one problem -- it wasn't a finger. The object that Sam found was actually a burnt jalapeno pepper.

Turns out someone who read Manning's blog quickly put his, er, finger on what the charred object really was.

"I got an email from some guy who was barbecuing and he saw my blog and he emailed me saying that you better take another look because it looked like a jalapeno they were barbecuing," said Manning. "I believed him."

"I feel that the finger incident has been resolved and I have put it behind me," he told The Times on Wednesday.