The message of “Homer’s Enemy” is far more Chesterton’s Fence than Peter Principle, and I think a lot of people miss that.
Everything Frank Grimes says is both obvious and true to the viewer.
The twist is that Frank Grimes is from our world, but Springfield isn’t. Where he ended up, nuclear power plants ooze glowing green goop and undereducated drunks pour sodas on control panels to short them out rather than investigate error messages. In our world, Springfield would be a slightly more colorful Pripiyat, the town evacuated in the wake of the Chernobyl disaster. But that keeps not happening!
The fundamental logic of Springfield is that of TV: big stuff happens, but it all has a way of returning to the status quo after 22 minutes. The Simpsons constantly makes reference to all the outlandish things Homer did, as if this mid-30s man actually did all the things he supposedly did over the last three decades of TV. They still callback Poochie, for chrissakes! It’s TV given self-awareness and this license to acknowledge its built-in logic.
For all his supposed knowledge and competence, Grimes’ skills of observation failed him miserably. He was driven to madness by a world that didn’t play by his rules. The lesson of “Homer’s Enemy” is that you can’t demand that a world you barely understand follow a set of rules that you do.