There is no harm in removing the cpu. You could take it out and put it in the dish washer if you wanted to. I would recommend turning off the heat drying cycle, I'm not sure how hot that gets. Alot of people are still in the frame of mind that you should never touch computer parts if you can avoid it, or that should be done in some sort of lab. Components have come along way since their inception. The two biggest risks you have to face with them is too much power (lightning strikes) or too little (bad PSU or brownouts). Other than that, take a little precaution about static discharge, don't use your hard drive to rub a grape juice stain out of your shag carpet, and you will be fine. Case in point I had a P3 processor that I would comb my short hair with, one day I slapped it in an old pc we had in the office, after cleaning off the dandruff, and it worked just fine. It may still be there running the timeclock, who knows...
As a side note, when you take a picture of some small object like that use the Macro function of your camera. It makes a world of difference.
sorry for the long post