Watching everybody loves Raymond. Now I make be expecting too much of people who have to consistently create situations of conflict...but...
Ray gets a letter from Muhammed Ali puts it in a draw and his wife accidently throws it out. What she immediately does is confide in the mother in law what she did. In reality you deny it to the day you die, nobody knows what you did but you. You never saw the letter, you never threw it out, and over time you convince them into thinking they lost it...like a normal person does, your standard gaslighting.
This should have been a 3 minute episode tops, or a four decade spanning epic.