Comment by steelframe

> I told him I could just walk out and fake a signature. He said that's OK and that he isn't a policeman. So I countersigned it in front of him. He paused and then accepted it.

Well, I mean, forgery is a class C felony, at least in my state. If you had walked in with the signature on it, the clerk would have had plausible deniability. Your act of forging in front of the clerk took the plausible deniability away, making them complicit to a felony.

You're really lucky they accepted it. They had no good reason to take on that legal risk.