The then-lottery commissioner from Charlotte sent such vehement e-mail messages blasting this newspaper and "anti-education lottery zealots" like me for our coverage of the earliest rumblings of scandal in the launching of the state lottery that for just a moment I thought perhaps we'd gone too far.

It must be the Catholic in me. I am such a sucker for a well-phrased guilt trip.

Then came the revelation that Geddings had received $24,500 in payments from Scientific Games, one of the nation's two leading companies vying for our billion-dollar lottery business, for helping to "educate" lawmakers.

"I will not be bullied into submission," he'd written. "I will not resign." Whoops ...

Now I wonder whether perhaps he didst protest too much.

I wrote to Geddings last week, copying back to him his letter to the editor. I asked how he felt about things now.

He wrote back:

"There is still this great ideal in this nation that you are innocent of wrongdoing until 'proven' otherwise. I'm not seeing much 'balance' in your paper this week."

Interesting.

I wrote again to ask him to expound.

Did he dispute the Scientific Games' filings with the Secretary of State's Office (revealing his recent paychecks)?

Does he see himself as a sacrificial lamb?

I wondered whether he regretted some of the examples of conflict he'd cited in his letter.

He wrote, "If someone serving as a Highway Commissioner has done business with or has had a friendship with a road building company manager, should he or she now resign from the NCDOT Board?"

His answer was, clearly, an implied no.

Mine is: Yes -- if that highway commissioner received $24,500 in payments from one of the two biggest pavement companies in the country to help "educate" lawmakers on road-building.

Funny, the once fiery-tongued Geddings didn't respond to my follow-up queries.

I guess someone told him it might be best to hold his tongue.

It's a lesson he learned a bit too late, I expect.

Of course, holding one's tongue, politely, is just one of the lessons I can take home to my children from this whole lottery start-up mess.

Others:

* Own up to what you've done, -- all of it, good, bad or otherwise -- right from the start. Geddings, in his letter, patted himself on the back because he had not only "openly acknowledged" (hardly) his longstanding friendship with a vice president of Scientific Games, he even mentioned that he'd subleased office space to the guy years before he got into the lottery biz. That, Geddings said, was "full disclosure."

Geddings neglected to mention that he was on Scientific Games' dole over the last several months, collecting $24,500.

* It doesn't matter what "everyone else" is doing. As my mother used to say, "If everyone else was inappropriately influencing one of the most lucrative pieces of legislation in state history, would you jump off that cliff, too?"

* And finally, there's the lottery lesson I'll repeat like a mantra from the moment the first billboards go up: Remember, kids, the lottery is a tax on people who can't do math.