Mitch Albom should have known better.

Albom is a sports columnist for the Detroit Free Press, a job he’s held for somewhere in the neighborhood of 20 years. In that role, he is one of the best-known and most-respected newspaper journalists in the country.

Albom also hosts a daily radio talk show in Detroit. It’s a pretty good show, but he spends way too much time talking about the Wolverines. People in Detroit like that kind of thing, I guess.

Oh yeah — Mitch is also one of the freaking best-selling authors of the past decade. He made about a gazillion dollars from Tuesdays with Morrie, and is making a truckload more on another more recent title.

I can’t remember the name of that one, but I should probably go buy a copy — if the last week is any indication, Mitch has shown that his real talent is for writing fiction.

I hadn’t heard about this until my Sports Illustrated arrived in the mail yesterday. A short item said Mitch had run into a little trouble. On the Sunday before the men’s basketball national championship game, Mitch wrote a really nice piece about two former Michigan State basketball players who had met in St. Louis to watch their alma mater in Saturday’s semifinal game. Mitch described what Mateen Cleaves and Jason Richardson were wearing in the stands, how they cheered on Michigan State and sometimes longed for their own days in college.

One problem: neither Cleaves nor Richardson attended the game Saturday. Their schedules changed, and neither could make it to St. Louis. And there, the following morning, is a column by Albom, describing the fun the players had at the game.

Albom interviewed both earlier in the week about their college experiences, and both guys, now players in the NBA, told Mitch they planned to attend Saturday’s game together. So Albom, faced with a busy schedule and a Friday deadline — the section that was to contain the column was preprinted Saturday, a common practice for newspapers trying to juggle tight schedules and bigger Sunday newspapers. So he wrote it up just as if he had been there, right along with Cleaves and Richardson, filed it and hightailed out of the newsroom, so he could make it to his radio studio or a fucking book appearance on time.

Mitch Albom, meet Jayson Blair. You folks may not remember Jayson Blair, but people in my business do — he’s the young New York Times reporter who was shitcanned when editors found that he had been writing most of his assignments from his apartment. He was a good enough writer that, with the help of some enabling editors, he got away with it for a while. But the bottom line was this: Blair made the shit up. And by doing that he brought a crushing level of damage to those who practice the profession as it should be, not writing fiction.

Think about the level of trust that has to exist for a newspaper to be successful. The people who put the product out every day have to have impeccable ethics reputations. Above reproach. We have to keep to that standard so the readers will trust that we’re not coloring our stories with an agenda, that’s we’re not too cozy with one side of that city council that’s split down the middle … that they can believe what’s in their newspaper is accurate and fair.

And if you’re not in the business, you don’t see what happens to a person whose trust in their newspaper has been betrayed. At least once a month, I run into someone who dislikes me just because someone at my paper screwed him over when I was still in high school.

Here’s an extreme example: A couple weeks after I started working at my current paper, one of our city editors asked me to check on a dispute between two neighboring municipal authorities, which typically handle the sewage system for their towns. One authority manager talked to me without any trouble, addressing the issues calmly and providing detailed answers to my questions.

When I called the second manager, I was met with silence. He eventually said that he didn’t talk to my paper and hung up. I called back and asked if there was something I could do to fix this problem and he explained that he was misquoted 15 years ago and has hated us since. He eventually agreed to meet with me, but ended up abruptly ending the session when I started to discuss the authority. He was so mad that actually shook when he got up from the table and left the room.

Somewhere along the line, one of my predecessors had done something that ended the trust that this guy had in his newspaper. And he never trusted us again.

The Blair and Albom incidents do the same thing, but on a macro scale. It taints your newspaper, and it taints mine. And it taints everyone who writes for any newspaper across the country. Believe me, it’s not something that makes us very happy. Here’s what one national columnist wrote about Blair’s infuriating lack of contrition when he signed his book deal: “What he doesn’t get is that journalism is not Hollywood. It’s not about closing the deal. It’s not about face time. It’s about, simply put, telling the truth.”

That, boys and girls, was written by Mitch Albom.

Albom has more writing talent in one arm than I have in my entire body. But in his apology he said that to write the column another way “would have required some weird writing.”

Utter bullshit.

Write that they were looking forward to the game. Write that they had talked to each other on their cell phones every day during the tournament. Christ, just write anything else. But don’t write about an event that hasn’t happened as if it had. Ever. Because, Mitch, that’s not the truth.

I’ve read people trying to explain Albom’s fakery as the result of him getting trapped by having too many obligations. That’s crap as well. We all have deadlines and deadline pressure; those of us who enjoy what we do enjoy it at least in part because we’re closet adrenaline junkies, and we get that occasional fix when we put together something really good with an editor pacing back and forth next to our desks.

I’ve heard Albom’s column referred to as a mistake. Um , no. Misspelling someone’s name is a mistake. Transposing numbers in a budget story — that’s a mistake. Mixing up days and dates — that’s a mistake.

Making something up and submitting it for publication isn’t a mistake. It’s fraud.

Blair fooled the New York Times for months. The administration at the Free Press is investigating Albom’s conduct, a probe the editors said may include reviews of past columns. If I was making the decision, I wouldn’t bother with an investigation. Albom would be out the door. The editors who read and approved Albom’s column would be right behind him.

The bottom line is this: a journalist who should have known better got lazy. He did something inexcusable. He lied. And he should be done.