Joe Paterno died

Pennsylvania millionaire Joe Paterno has died of lung cancer at age 85.

He made a fortune as a football coach at a public university. He was paid over a million dollars a year in taxpayer dollars, pretended to be a moral paragon, then was fired when it became known that he couldn't be bothered to call the police when he found out his assistant coach raped a 10-year-old boy in the locker room at the university.

Paterno was a devout Catholic. He must have had some clue what was going on with the Mother Church's child sex abuse scandal that went on for years. Yet he claimed in an interview that he was an innocent naif who didn't even know it was possible for a man to rape a boy. What did he think the church was condemning all those years?

He almost got away with it. If he had keeled over just three months earlier, or if his crimes had been exposed just three months later, he would have been home free instead of dying in disgrace.

And disgrace was all he suffered. He was unemployed for three months, but he would have quit anyway since he was starting treatment for his smoking-related illness. And even then, people still defended him. Pro-child-rape university students started a riot to protest his firing.