What do you do when a poster takes everything you say the wrong way?

This is not happening to me on this forum, but I’m sure it’s happened sometimes to others here so I was wondering what you’d do in this situation.

I was on another site and started an extremely light hearted thread that was just talking about things people liked in the game we all play. Whenever people posted on the thread, I’d answer Fluther style about what I thought about whatever they said. Basically just “Oh, yeah. What a great idea. I like that.” or “That’s not really how I like to play, but thanks for sharing..” Pretty mild banter.

All of the sudden out of nowhere, this guy I barely even noticed in the thread just started accusing me of trying to take over the forum and be a moderator. He said that he found my thread offensive.

I apologized to him and said I didn’t understand why he’d find the thread so offensive since everyone else seemed to be having fun. He took that post to mean that I was being condescending to him and that the topic (which was basically.. if you could change one thing about the game, what would it be?) was too much of a hot button issue and he never should have gotten mixed up with people who just wanted to start trouble.

I PMed him and told him that I had no idea how he was misunderstanding everything I was saying and that I had no agenda and was not trying to threaten him. He said that he’s reported me to a forum administrator for sending him threatening PMs.

I know the guy is a kook. I know that the forum administrators aren’t going to ban me over this. I have looked around the forums and I notice that he is very hypersensitive and seems to get into fights like this all the time.

But I still feel like there could have been a graceful out that wouldn’t lead to this guy trying to get me banned from the site. Should I have just totally ignored him and pretended that he never posted in the thread? Is there any way to be graceful when someone seems totally off the wall and weird when responding to you in a forum?