Illinois could issue an Amber Alert for missing honesty

Honestly, has anyone in Illinois seen the truth lately?

In a quicksand of lies, our disposable, Democratic Sen. Roland Burris slips deeper into the muck with every struggle to find a story he can cling to as the truth. Burris has "He said/He said" debates with himself.

No one is shocked that we are having an honesty crisis with a guy appointed in the last throes of the Rod Blagojevich administration. Our former governor is an impeached, national punch line, who ran on a promise to clean up the dishonest, criminal administration of his predecessor, George Ryan, who must wonder from his prison cell why federal prosecutors made an example of him if no one paid attention.

"It's abysmal. All I can say is Illinois is a kind of laughingstock," says Charles Lipson, a professor at the University of Chicago who lectures on the value of honesty, and wrote the book, "Doing Honest Work in College."

"I'm traveling in New York and you just hear joke after joke - 'Illinois governors making our license plates,'" Lipson says during a cell phone interview. "Roland Burris is a national laughingstock, too."

Already a joke because he built a massive mausoleum the size of his ego, Burris is waltzing around the truth as if he's hoping to grab Belinda Carlisle's spot on the March premiere of "Dancing with the Stars."

"You are not only told to tell the truth, but the whole truth," reminds Lipson, who clearly isn't buying Burris' reasons for not being upfront during the impeachment hearings.

Illinois may be the MVP of dishonesty, but there is plenty of room in the team photo - depending, of course, on what the meaning of the word "is" is.

President Obama's new Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner won confirmation despite owing $40,000 in back taxes and interest. Cabinet nominee Tom Daschle withdrew after it was discovered he owed about $130,000 in unpaid taxes. Nancy Killefer withdrew because she failed to pay unemployment taxes for household employees.

In an effort to escape from the cheating, don't turn to sports. Baseball's Alex Rodriguez's daily apology for taking performance-enhancing drugs doesn't end the steroid cheating mess that has put our national past time under suspicion.

As for that "the whole truth" requirement, readers sometimes take me to task for writing columns about people without mentioning pending indictments, marital woes and other sins I intentionally leave out. I think I'm honest (at least honest enough to be a cabinet member), but I don't always volunteer the whole truth.

When my annual review form asked me to list my flaws, I wrote "false modesty." I didn't see the point in providing bosses with reasons to pay me less. I think that stems from my years as a second-baseman. If I turned a double-play and the umpire called the sliding runner "out," I did not confess that the guy was safe because I missed the bag.

But golfer Roy Biancalana did just that. When Biancalana was the teaching professional at St. Andrews Golf & Country Club in West Chicago, he played the first round in the 2004 PGA Championship at 1-under par, putting him in the top 30 and ahead of Tiger Woods.

After he was done for the day, he told a tournament official that he had kicked a stick in frustration after one of his drives landed in a bunker. While moving that stick had no bearing on his next shot, Biancalana rode back to the bunker with an official and they determined he had committed a technical violation of the rules and deserved a two-strike penalty.

"I called a penalty on myself, and it almost made me miss the cut," recalls Biancalana. "But don't hold me up as the paragon of honesty."

He says the reason he was so honest that day in 2004 is because during that same tournament the year before, his wife and mistress found out about his cheating double life.

"It all came to light during the tournament and I finished dead last," Biancalana says of the 2003 tourney.

He used that awful experience built on lies to construct a new, happier, honest life, says Biancalana, who now operates a life-coaching business at www.coachingwithroy.com.

"Knowing that you are out of integrity yourself will eat you up," he says. "What I realized is it (dishonesty) only ends up destroying you."

That day after he told on himself in golf, he hit the best shot of his life (a 3-wood that found the hole from 297 yards out) for an eagle that picked up the two strokes he had lost by being honest.

"Just a little karma coming back to me," Biancalana says.

If we need karmic rewards to inspire honesty in the land of "Honest Abe," so be it. But there is an even better reason to be honest.

"Honesty," Lipson says, "is important for its own sake."