TV preacher Jimmy Swaggart got caught with a prostitute. His religious band kicked him off the podium.

He went back on stage weeping and gnashing his teeth, gushing with apologies. He’s back on TV crying and preaching – and asking for money.

Jim Bakker had a little TV gig called the PTL Club. He was preaching, too, and asking for money. He went to jail for his scam. Thousands got bilked. He wept and moaned.

Bakker is back on TV preaching – and asking for money.

There is a guy who preached on TV and asked you to send prayer cloths to him – with money attached. He was going to lay hands on them and send them back.

The prayer cloths were found in the dumpster behind his corporate offices – no money attached. His scam got him kicked off the air.

He’s back preaching about sowing the seeds (dollars) in his fertile fields.

Rafael Palmeiro plays baseball – on steroids. He got kicked off the podium for 10 days. He has no idea how the steroids got into his body.

He says he will explain. Whatever Congress wants, he will supply it to them. Congress will determine if he committed perjury when he testified under oath – finger pointed at a congressman – that he never used steroids, period.

Perhaps, with divine intervention, he can explain what happened and the miraculous intercession of his body and a steroid that is not found in supplements and would have to have been ingested or injected.

Palmeiro is a preacher now. He wants you to believe – in him. Or not.

Like the other scam artists, they all count on the public being too busy with their lives to worry about steroids and baseball or God and fraud.

There have been other major leaguers caught and punished for steroid use this year.

Can you name them? How about one of them? Oh, well.

People are dying in Iraq to protect us from the 911 connection there; no, wait, from weapons of mass destruction; no, wait, from Moslem extremists; no, wait, from anti-democratic tendencies like arresting people without charges and holding them in makeshift prisons; no, wait…. Oh, well.

Palmeiro gets it – or his hired help does. Keep talking. Change the story as need be. Make it fit the last story – or not.

Spin the whole thing for a while and you’ll be back on TV before you know it – making big money.

Preachers, politicians, players, and the public … all posing in stupefied disbelief, hoping to forget.

Old Town native Gary Thorne is an ESPN and ABC sportscaster.