Hamilton Nolan over at Gawker is most out of character this morning, giving Greg Mortenson, the famed school-builder, a pass on fabricating critical parts of his monster-selling memoir, "Three Cups of Tea." Strangely, Nolan also ignores the devastating article by Jon Krakauer that appeared the day after the 60 Minutes report that exposed Mortenson's deceptions (or, per Nolan, simply his sloppiness).

Mortenson has built a non-profit empire devoted to school-building in Pakistan and Afghantistan largely on the strength of the stories told in his book. Not only are many of those stories untrue, he also runs his non-profit without any of the financial accountability that is legally and ethically required of all non-profits, according to Krakauer and 60 Minutes.

Nolan says: "Look, fine, the guy's not a professional writer, he kind of glossed over some details, maybe got some things wrong, maybe even fabricated something for the sake of appearances. He probably never imagined his book would do so well! It's not the greatest literary crime ever."

Not sure that I know from greatest literary crimes ever, but I'm pretty sure that taking money from school-children and spending it on private jet flights to Telluride, as Krakauer says Mortenson did, is more than, and more serious than, a literary crime.

Almost as appalling is Mortenson's gall in blaming the made-up stuff on his co-auther, which Nolan also doesn't seem to find weird and shameless. Don't know about you, but if someone was writing about my experiences I would be pretty interested in whether they were recounting those experiences truthfully.

I never met Mortenson during my time in Montana, even though lots of people urged me to write something about him for my old publication, NewWest.Net. Something about things that seem too good to be true...