was there any actual apology or retraction or did they just pretend it never existed?
They just deleted it. normally, news organizations will post a retraction. You know, so people aren't repeating it as truth because they read it as news.
They just heard something about Obama writing an email TO AMERICA - a huge, ranting meltdown email of 127 pages - and they printed it. It would, of course, be a HUGE HUGE story, were Obama to do this. So they ran it. Without checking any source. They just read it on Onion (or received some chain mail) and just printed it.
insane.