The bad old David Simon comes back to the fore in a 40-minute-long interview with Terri Gross this week. Gross unfortunately tiptoes past Simon’s crazy slanders of his former editors at the Baltimore Sun, Bill Marimow and John Carroll.

When she asks about his use of the name “Marimow” for a thug police lieutenant brought in to undercut the heroic wire squad’s work, Simon says this was “playful. “ He continues: “I placed the name in a locale where I thought there was plausible deniability and then I changed the name. I made it “Charles.’”

It seems like he’s making an inane joke—how would changing the first name matter?—but in the interview he seems serious. After that, he says, “My past is my past; I’m entitled to tell stories with it the same way anyone in fiction is entitled to tell stories.”

Here is where Gross should have followed up. The problem with naming the thug cop “Marimow” is that, in real life, Marimow is the one who stood up to the Tribune Company, at the Baltimore Sun, and was fired. For Simon to portray him as someone brought in to destroy the unit’s work is a Big Lie.

Then Simon tries to cloak that crime into a challenge to his artistic freedom. Of course Simon’s entitled to do anything. After he does, we’re entitled to make our own judgment: that Simon is a liar and a thug himself.

For the record, that’s Simon’s biggest crime. But there are two lesser ones as well. For the second, most of the rest of this season, his two Sun editors, based on Marimow and Carroll, are effete Fancypantses, letting a fabricator run wild. Simon has based this on his own experiences, and they are accordingly less venal; they’re just misguided and exaggerated.

Simon has long campaigned against a Baltimore Sun reporter, Jim Haner, who he said made stories up. The available record, which Hitsville detailed here (”Revealed: David Simon’s nemesis!”), is far less heinous that that of a Jayson Blair or a Stephen Glass. The version in “The Wire” this season is cartoonish and crude.

As for the Pulitzer fetishism, this is merely part of Simon’s antiquated, romanticized and unfortunate nostalgia for the newspapers of old—before the Internet and young female Hispanic reporters—when a bunch of loud fat fucks held sway over the nation’s newsroom. Those days are long gone, and good riddance. Simon’s fetishization of all of this is just quaint.

But it’s one other thing, as well, and that’s harmful to his art, which heretofore seemed unerring. It’s a shame his cockamamie psyche has ruined what should have been his crowning achievement this season. Based on the Terry Gross interview, it hasn’t sunk in yet.