serial, sequence, and COPY FROM

All,

I have a pipe delimited text file I'm trying to copy to a table. The
file has 17 fields per line. The table has 18, with that last field
(record) a serial with sequence. I have done:
select setval('sequence_name_seq', 555, 'TRUE')
but when I do: COPY tablename FROM '/path/to/file/file.txt' delimiter
'|'
the copy stops at the first row, insisting that it's missing data for
the field record. Well, yeah...
I can make this work with inserts but not with COPY FROM. What I've
been doing is dumping it into a mysql table with an auto_increment
field and then dumping that into a text file and using that for the
COPY FROM; certainly clumsy. How might this be done?

r