New York- Daily News editor-in-chief Michael “Cookie Monster” Cooke indulged a kinky “fetish” for women’s footwear by assigning stories about his obsession while he was editor of the Chicago Sun-Times, according to a columnist who worked for him.

Fashion writer Jennifer Hunter revealed in the Sun-Times last week that Cooke’s preoccupation with sexy shoes was the talk of the newsroom.

“One reason I am convinced that pointy shoes are a male plot to demean women is that a former male editor at the Sun-Times had a fetish for women’s footwear,” Hunter wrote in the Chicago paper.

“He thought they were intensely sexy – if infantilizing a woman by making her totter in heels down the hall like a toddler is really sexy – and he kept commissioning stories about them, over the protests of women staff members.

“When Vincente Fox came to town last year, the main news for this editor was not the Mexican president’s message, but Mrs. Fox’s footwear. We ran an unconscionable number of photos of Mrs. Fox in the paper – from the knee down.

“My former editor recently ran a week of shoe stories at his new paper, the New York Daily News, including a shoe horoscope, which he kindly passed along.”

Indeed, Cooke orchestrated the Snooze’s inexplicable “Shoe Week” coverage earlier this month, complete with a package of stories headlined, “Shoe’s Gotta Have it: How New York’s Most Fashionable Females Stay Well-Heeled.”

Daily News spokeswoman Eileen Murphy told us: “It seems clear that this column was intended to be funny and nothing more. I suspect Miss Hunter would confirm this rather obvious observation.

“As for Mr. Cooke, he asked me to tell you that he likes women’s shoes, but he wears them only on Fridays and after dark.”

Asked whether Cooke was the driving force behind “Shoe Week,” Murphy said, “He’s the editor. And he did participate in the decision to do it. It was a feature series. We did ‘Yellow Ribbon Week’ [last] week. We’re doing a lot of these kinds of series.”