M IAMI – Turns out, we might have been fooled all along by the Falcon safety, frozen by a Super Bowl hypocrisy so great it is worthy of roman numerals.

Robinson was booked Saturday night, not from the Good Book from which he quotes, not from the first-person inspirational tome about God and football that he published last year. The winner of the 1999 Bart Starr Award by Athletes in Action for morals and service to the community allegedly offered $40 for oral sex to an undercover police officer on Biscayne Boulevard here.

Robinson was taken in, then released on his own recognizance, which, we can only assume, he has known for some time to be unrecognizable as the person he has purported to be.

“You can’t help but learn from a guy who carries himself so well off the field, too,” defensive backfield mate Ray Buchanan had said earlier in the week.

Now, with a wife in town, with the world watching, the NFL’s active leader in interceptions is intercepted allegedly cruising for sexual release before the big game. Probably not since Jim Bakker, has any public figure taken his own piety in the face like this.

The alleged crime itself, in terms of damage to society, is petty, arguably victimless, worthy more of titters than outrage. It’s also far from being even the greatest pregame scandal in Super Bowl history. Ten years ago, Stanley Wilson of the Cincinnati Bengals was found almost out of his mind from cocaine in his hotel room the night before the game, a victim of addiction and pressure that was pathetic, fast on its way toward becoming tragic. Wilson now faces a third conviction, and life imprisonment, on a burglary charge.

Robinson’s bad step – if it happened, of course – would be more a slip on a banana peel, good comedy to anyone never fooled by him, a betrayal not of himself but about himself. It turns out that the top-of-the-line role model is the state of the art in sanctimony.

Earlier in the week Robinson talked effusively about God and family, even took a shot at the Patriots’ alleged night-time behavior that helped doom them to a 1997 Super Bowl defeat by his Packers. The 35-year-old-enough-to-know-better veteran leader drew Falcons to team Bible study and had a role in the recent Christian conversions of Cornelius Bennett and William White.

In his book, “It Takes Endurance,” Robinson talked about how his own faith reminded Reggie White of his own, helping him through his weariness against the Patriots. “They that wait upon the Lord shall renew their strength,” Robinson said, quoting Isaiah.

Now it’s his humiliated wife Gia, 11-year-old daughter Brittany and 9-year-old son Brandon who need to wait upon their God to renew their strength if what Robinson is accused of turns out to be true.

That is always the worst of these things. Those found out to be saying one thing, doing another, obviously had little sense of embarrassment in the act that got them in trouble, only in the shame of getting caught. So pardon our cynicism while they squirm and the people around them spin. They get what the deserve from the courts and from the public’s salacious appetite for their misdeeds.

Once that dual sentence is served, time, the only true absolver, does its stuff, working toward either lessons learned or lives like Stanley Wilson’s.

So we’ll spare you any hand-wringing of how Robinson let down his teammates and fans. All truly moral beings, ranging from those who wear their religions on their sleeves to those who do not even believe in God, do the right thing for the sake of themselves, families, friends, and society without need of the example of the free safety of the upstart NFC champions.

The President of the United States has done worse, or at least, been shown to have done it more often, and the majority of Americans still somehow love him. That’s their right, one supposes. So great is our capacity to forgive and forget that we’ll be surprised if CBS, which talked to Robinson about an analyst job last year, isn’t still interested if he lays low for another year on the field.

This alleged crime deserves no greater punishment than it will get – a fine and time in the stocks of America’s town square for Eugene Robinson. But in the meantime, the one who suffers most grievously is not Robinson, who made his choice, not Dan Reeves, six weeks out of bypass surgery, not his teammates, as many of whom will probably be amused as let down. It’s Gia Robinson who most failed to deserve this, who probably is more than Eugene Robinson deserves.

You can fill up a dime package with guys like him. You work with them, are related to them, can’t help but enjoy their exposure for what they really are. A misunderstanding, he called what happened on Biscayne Boulevard Saturday night. A misunderstanding he apparently had consciously perpetuated all along.