Some things are just too funny.

This Michael Phelps flap makes me giggle. Really. Out loud giggling. Why? Because it demonstrates so much about what is wrong and silly about American sports and celebrity.

Swimming is a sport that, three weeks before the Olympics 90 percent of Americans barely knew existed and 99 percent of them couldn't name 2 professional swimmers. So, here comes the big TV event and the network hypes up this goofy looking kid from Baltimore and he starts winning races - against a bunch of other people that none of us knew existed.

He broke Spitz's gold medal record and he's so popular that his mom is being interviewed by Bob Costas, after getting more TV face time than Oprah.

When he comes home, he's glorified with parades and invitations to talk shows. We honor him more than we honor war veterans and life-saving airline pilots.

By the way, how many product endorsement offers has Chesley Sullenburger received since he saved the lives of those people in US Airways Flight 1549? Zero, I think.

Anyway, the media hype machine is in full thrust, and Phelps' agents are telling us how much money he is going to make on product endorsements and appearances - because he can swim faster than anyone else. That, in itself is hilarious. That Kellogg's and Rosetta Stone want to pay him millions of dollars to appear in their advertisements is beyond comprehensible to me.

Later, the kid whom we thrust into the public spotlight goes to a frat party and hits a bong, and we flip. "My God, what will the children think?" What the children should be thinking is how stupid mom and dad look for glorifying an athlete to that extent, while regular people who work their asses off at jobs don't make in a year what this goofball makes in two days.

So, Kellogg's rescinded their lucrative endorsement deal and Phelps was suspended for 3 months. Big deal. That's like suspending a high school teacher from June to August. Phelps isn't going to work again until 2012. Three months' suspension is a token fine.

Now we (society) are forced to examine the way we treat people - or at least we should be. He "disappointed" us, so we took away his toys and smacked his wrists.

The part that makes me giggle the most is that we are the ones who placed him on such a high platform. When he acted like a human, we told him that he was wrong. We treated him differently when all along, he was just the same as us. We won't tolerate that.

The real fault lies in the treatment, not with the acts of the individual. That's the lesson we should be teaching children.