Scandal has shocked the Internet world. People recently found out that Lonely Girl 15, a popular poster on the site Youtube.com is a fake, unlike everything else on Youtube.com. Youtube is your source for videos of monkeys riding kittens and that clip where a kid hits a melon filled with gasoline.

Due to investigative and diligent bloggers who bravely found time between their World of Warcraft games and LARPing, Lonely Girl 15 was revealed to actually be a 45- year-old man in a dress. Just kidding. She was actually discovered to be an actress whose story was written by three male writers. It’s fictitious, and the bloggers are pissed. And when the bloggers are pissed, man, no one is safe. They’ll pump you so full of leet you’ll go crying home to your fan fiction and manga.

I’m trying to figure out why people are surprised that it is fake. Let’s see here... a hot girl with impeccable complexion, a great Web camera and an altar of Aleister Crowley, an occultist. Nope, seems perfectly run of the mill to me.

Of course, there were other things that tipped me off. In one episode, you can see that her shoes and belt don’t match — something no bona fide 16-year-old girl would do. Later in the show, the microphone boom hits her on the head and if you lower the volume, you can hear the writers eating chips. Also, the chicken she sacrificed was clearly already dead, thus ruining a true fertilization ceremony to her occult master.

But what I think is interesting from a sociological perspective is why people are so upset. People feel like they’ve been lied to. I’m curious why that makes a difference. It’s a story that they are viewing; whether it is true or not isn’t really important, right? Or are little bloggers now buying their own Aleister Crowley altars and dating their own bland wimpy boyfriends? Does it being fictitious make it less profound? Do people find more inspiration from the truth?

I posed this debate to myself and whoever was listening to me at the time when the James Frey controversy started brewing. This guy wrote his memoir and it turned out major segments of it were fake. First this Charlotte Simmons chick’s memoir turns out to be written by some old dude, and now this Frey guy — next you’ll be telling me that Bill Clinton omitted some key details from his memoir.

While previously applauded, Frey was now slammed by people. The publisher is even offering a refund for anyone who bought the book under the assumption that it was truth. In order to overcome their own problems, thousands of Oprah fans had tried imitating Frey’s story by going on drinking binges, blacking out and spending time in rehab. I didn’t realize Frey’s story was in the self-help section. I mean, I agree that lying about your life story in college applications, job interviews and reality shows is morally reprehensible. But books are different to me. I don’t care if “Memoirs of a Geisha” was fictitious or not; I don’t plan on whoring myself out to Japanese businessmen anytime soon. With memoirs, you are paying for their stories; they are being paid to give you entertaining versions of their life stories. That’s why you’d rather read about geishas and anarchist schizophrenics than anything by Rachel Ray. No? Ok, that’s just me then.

I don’t sweat these lies. If James Frey told me that his wallet was stolen by a leopard that he had to fight off with a cooking whisk, I’d command his creative retelling of part of his life. I mean, he was an alcoholic — that’s probably how he remembered it anyway. If Lonely Girl 15 wants to explain that she worships the occult and makes puppets out of lemons, I’ll applaud her amazing ability to smear goat’s blood on herself without letting her makeup run. Fiction or make-believe, I don’t plan on imitating these people.

People try to separate reality from fantasy, but that’s becoming increasingly harder to do. Every day we are bombarded by images of what is going on in the world around us and told by talking heads what to think of them. The reality is twisted into fantasy. People hate being lied to. I get that. But I think we Americans should be angrier when being lied to about things that actually matter.

Like when Newt Gingrich states that Republicans were afraid to aggressively investigate Foley because of fear of being called “homophobic.” Or that the upper level GOP members didn’t know about Foley’s actions. Or that we can ever win against an abstract concept, like “Terror” or “Drugs” or “Premature Balding.”

I guess I’m worried about when people don’t recognize fantasy and they start believing lies. They don’t understand who is pulling the strings, the “why” of the lie. If little Lonely Girl 15 began to tell us that her battle against science extended to fighting Darwinism, you’d want to know Lonely Girl 15 was funded by a Kansas PAC. You’d also probably want to know how on earth they got the Internet to Kansas.

So I worry that we get angry over the stupid shit. Angry bloggers posted their own videos to reveal the “truth” of Lonely Girl 15 as if she had done something truly traitorous, like canceled “Sealab 2021.” James Frey was crucified for indulging stories of his life about booze and prison time — the terrible impact this will have on his career as a high school motivational speaker we will never know. But when are we going to step forward and actually demand the truth about things that matter?

Like, for instance, excluding people from Facebook. That’s something we can all get behind.

Most popular college causes to get behind: excluding people from Facebook, truth in blogging and fair play in beer pong. Who says we’re apathetic? Send complaints to chris.holt@gmail.com.