“Although it should have been obvious that the Babylon Bee piece was just a spoof....”

They didn’t take it seriously. They fact-checked it on the basis that someone else might take it seriously.

You can't be serious. "CNN uses washer machine to spin ..." sounds utterly ridiculous. It is ridiculous. It can only be satire. Who would ever say such a thing and mean it? Answer: only mentally disabled people. And who would take them seriously? Unless you think most people are so disabled, there's no point "debunking" obvious satire, and if so many people were so disabled, then there'd be no point debunking anything anyways.

It’s about as ridiculous as “Obama founded ISIS” and yet our President apparently believed that one.