Same as the sacred pact in journalism. We may get ugly, but we're not going to lie to you.

I know, this sounds familiar—I chopped at this particular tree before. But I bring it up again because of Bruce Schimmel's "Loose Canon" this week. Go ahead, take a look. I'll wait.

Now I love Bruce, but as I edited his column, I was overcome with the urge to take an axe to him.

Bruce doesn't quite defend Nick Sylvester, the Village Voice writer who was caught fabricating the closing scene in his cover story, "Do You Wanna Kiss Me?" But he comes close. He calls Sylvester's composite scene hardly "journalistically shocking," and muses that perhaps Sylvester's fabricated scene was his way of winking at "an accepted convention."

Bruce, I don't think Sylvester was "winking" at the reader.

I think Sylvester was fishing for a final scene he didn't have, so he took some quotes from buddies (all of whom, as Gawker.com reported, happened to be Harvard Lampoon alums)—or maybe he invented those, too—and cooked up this scene where they were hanging out at a Manhattan bar together. Sylvester probably assumed his friends wouldn't rat him out. Who was to know, right?

If there's one thing that journalism teachers ought to staple to their foreheads, it is this simple—yet seemingly forgotten—rule: Don't make shit up. I'm not kidding; the frequency of Blairs and Glasses and Sylvesters make me fearful about the next generation of journalists coming up through the ranks.

Here's why: Fabricating a scene is easy. And you're often rewarded for it.

It's a temptation that's bedeviled every journalist at least once (probably dozens) of times. If only my source had said this … or in just this pithy way, like I would write it.

Meanwhile, we editors are constantly prodding our writers to give us copy that's more exciting, full of jaw-dropping dialogue and scenes that explode off the page. We also want them to be 100 percent true, to the best of a reporter's knowledge. The balance between the two—telling true stories as creatively and memorably as possible—is the fun of this job.

But overeager beavers like Glass and Sylvester seem to be far too comfortable cheating on one side of that equation. And editors either aren't smart enough or vigilant enough to catch it. Or worse, they don't care.

Remember the whole hatchet-and-cherry-tree story? Most historians agree that it was most likely invented by a Washington biographer named Mason Weems. But people everywhere take it as fact.

That's the reason for the symbol.

If we're not vigilant about separating truth from fiction, can you imagine what schoolkids will be saying about George W. Bush in 200 years?

Dear Councilman,

Yeah, I know you're busy and all of that, but I had to write. I just read that you're refusing to step down from office, and you still want to collect your paycheck. This strikes me as odd, seeing that you've been convicted of a host of corruption charges and you are currently in jail. So there's no way you can actually report to your job. Hence, you're not earning that paycheck. Unless you've somehow figured out how to field calls and present new legislation to Council while you're hanging out at Club Fed.

This may sound harsh—heck, many of your fellow councilmembers seem to think so—but you were convicted of a series of crimes, right? You broke the public trust. You used the powers we gave you to pay off credit card debt. And you have the councilman-cajones to want us to keep paying your salary, for as long as it takes to officially sentence you.

In the words of Carter (William Devane) in the 1999 flick Payback: "No corporation in the world would agree to what you're asking."

So do the right thing. Step down. Believe me, this city could put your paycheck to better use elsewhere.