Dick Harmon: Saga of Manti Te'o keeps burning on daily fuel

Is Te’o culpable? Is he totally innocent, the victim of a cruel hoax? As he told Couric, he admits he was “not forthcoming” enough at critical times as this story of a fake girl friend’s death simply spun out of his control.

What’s next? We have only to wait, it seems.

But this entire story underscores the complex holes all of us can dig when we deal in duplicity. It is the act of seeming rather than being, pretending one identity while living another. At times, most of us face situations where we choose to step on this slope.

Boy, are we better off if we avoid it. Ask Armstrong, Woods and Sandusky.

Tuiasosopo shouldn’t have run a scam. Te’o shouldn’t have trusted a voice over a real person he’d seen with his own eyes, and said otherwise. The media shouldn’t have been as enthralled with the dramatic story and accepted it as truth when they couldn’t find an obituary or other evidence Kekua existed. ESPN editors should have reported what they knew before the website Deadspin did it for them.

But nobody’s perfect.

And that’s why these stories become headlines.

Dick Harmon, Deseret News sports columnist, can be found on Twitter as Harmonwrites and can be contacted at dharmon@desnews.com.