Whacky WGET issue...

Hello everyone! Crazy question: I've created a little script that reads in .txt files and, with the help of phplib templates, matches them up with a collection of templates and spits out the beautiful html page. In order to avoid sending variables through the URL I've stolen this bizarre workaround where, when you call http://www.mysite.com/somepage.html for example, the apache configuration realizes it's a 404 and redirects all 404s through my cms script. Then my script looks for http://www.mysite.com/somepage.txt and does the rest. This works beautifully, and my plan was to have a "dev" environment that runs against the little CMS system and then wget the whole site periodically for the live server (so, the live site actually *is* a collection of flat pages). Beautiful plan, but it turns out that WGET doesn't see the apache configuration change that runs all 404s through my CMS script. It sees a 404 and tells me its a 404 and then goes back to its coffee break, you know? Anyone else tried this workaround before with similar results? Anyone else have a better workaround? Bueller? Anyway, best, Sondra