Our tolerant times allow us to smile wanly at the fool’s misalignment with reality, but not to savage him with demeaning words.
Not so the biblical proverbs. In the Bible’s sinecure of realism, the fool represents a rogue threat to communal health. He is not merely exercising individual preferences or making choices that one might not care to follow. He is a shredder of valuable cloth, an undiscerning revolutionary against the nourishing status quo that has taken generations to construct.
He is not, as with us, to be pitied but rather condemned and rooted out. If he will not listen, he does not only show himself without hope. He proves himself lethal.
None of this falls easily on our exceedingly patient ears. Perhaps we can strain our perceptive empathy just enough to see the point of a tranche of proverbs that delineates the unreliability of the fool:
It is like cutting off one’s foot and drinking down violence,
to send a message by a fool.
The legs of a disabled person hang limp;
so does a proverb in the mouth of a fool.
It is like binding a stone in a sling
to give honor to a fool.
If the notion of severing a limb or drinking violence seems disproportionate to a fool’s penchant for screwing up any representative task, of harming our reputation and misleading a business partner in our name, that is a problem of our own perception and we must name it. Perhaps we have not valued reliability deeply enough. Maybe we have underestimated the power both of word and of truth.
The second and third of the quoted proverbs show both the fool and the one stupid enough to commission him with any important task to be pathetic. If we do not recognize his lethal habit of error, we have become like him.
Fools employ fools.
Canter Bridge 
I am overjoyed by this post! Oh, how it frustrates me when we tolerate fools! And yet I have been one (some would argue that I still screw up enough to be considered one)…so what do I need to do to not be judgmental and yet correct the fool? Is that how it works? It was easy for Solomon to judge…he was the wisest man in the world. But what about those of us who have been the fool? And may be the fool again? What are we to do?