I had planned to write a post about the big, fat September Vogue and editrix Anna Wintour’s latest anointed tennis star, Alexander Zverev, who at 19 is the youngest player to crack the top 30 since Novak Djokovic a decade ago. (The magazine article’s headline blares “Alexander the Great” above a picture of a shirtless, Alexandrian figure indeed.)

But I’m afraid such pleasures pale with the news that Brazilian Police have recommended that Ryan Lochte be charged with falsely reporting a crime for saying he’d been robbed at a gas station during the Rio Games.

Prosecutors may still decline charging him, but if they go ahead, Lochte could have a lawyer appear on his behalf. It’s hard to imagine him returning to a place where he urinated against a gas station wall and ripped a poster off it before being forced at gunpoint to pay compensation.

If charged and convicted, he could face up to six months jail time or a fine. Lochte might’ve gotten away with a fine had he not left shortly after the fiasco. But at present, opinion seems divided as to whether the Brazilians would’ve let him leave. They have not exactly been truthful themselves, exaggerating urination and a ripped poster into acts of vandalism and five-figure fines and downplaying what might’ve appeared to some to be extortion. Perhaps the police should charge themselves with false report.

In any event, it seems as if we’ve reached the backlash-against-the-backlash stage of the scandal, in which the public – particularly the American public – has decided that Lochte has suffered enough and the Brazilians are acting like bullies. Director Michael Moore has issued a spirited defense of Lochte. Pine Bros. Cough Drops has offered him a contract. And the second most decorated male swimmer in Olympic history is slated to appear on “Dancing With the Stars.”

Proving that F. Scott Fitzgerald was wrong when he said “There are no second acts in American lives.”