This is the story of an 83-year-old man living in a Midwestern city. We'll call him Dr. X. He was the former president of a small but prestigious liberal arts college. I met him, almost four decades ago, when he appeared as a guest on a weekly television show I produced.

Following retirement, Dr. X went on to become the executive director at a major not-for-profit educational institution.

I knew Dr. X in his role as college president, but also as an educator, a minister and an author of books that thoughtfully reflected on the meaning of human sexuality in a Christian context. He was intelligent, empathic, contemplative and, yes, liberal. But then, one had to be liberal to discuss human sexuality in the early 1960s.

A few weeks ago, I was swept by a profound sense of sadness as I read a short, seven-paragraph newspaper story, headlined, "Ex-College Chief Held in Internet Sex Sting." It described how this man was allegedly - the word not used in any of the newspaper stories - chatting on America Online with someone he thought was a 16-year-old boy and making plans for a real-life meeting.

I am not yet privy to the chat room logs and transcripts, which may or may not be introduced into the trial proceedings. I don't know if there will be an actual trial. In most such cases, prosecutors allow the defendant to plead guilty to a lesser change. The government has taken its pound of flesh by triggering legal costs that have pushed Dr. X to the point of bankruptcy. In this case, the state additionally demanded a $100,000 bond.

We would presume Dr. X innocent as a matter of civil right, of course. But given his career in sexual counseling, his story also rings true.

The "16-year-old, whom Dr. X describes as unusually sophisticated, was really Sgt. Dave Margliano of the police department in Channonhon, Ill., population 8,000. Dr. X says the person he thought was a teenager seemed confused about his sexuality and desperate for the counsel of an older, wiser person; according to Dr. X, the person repeatedly asked that Dr. X meet him.

Though Dr. X has counseled thousands of young people in the past, often for similar problems, he stresses that he kept resisting these entreaties to meet. When he finally did agree to a meeting, he imposed a crucial restriction - he would meet him for "for legal purposes only." Dr. X says that, whatever the youth's expectations, he intended to do what he had done for all his professional life as an author, lecturer, assistant minister and chairman of the religious department in a highly regarded college in Massachusetts: counsel someone troubled by the complexities and confusion that surround sex within a Christian context.

"And I made the mistake of going to the train station to meet him," Dr. X says.

The Trap

At the station, Dr X. was arrested and charged with "indecent solicitation of a child."

Perhaps there is not much crime in Channonhon, allowing Margliano to spend time in AOL chat rooms, persistently attempting to trap an 83-year-old man. At any rate, all this energetic police work is taking place under the auspices of Illinois Attorney General Jim Ryan, who created a Child Exploitation Task Force. The task force employs federal, state and local resources, such as Margliano, and is part of Ryan's High-Tech Crimes Bureau.

It's awfully hard to chase down professional cybercriminals who, according to one 1999 estimate, are stealing $45 billion per year from corporations and businesses. That takes knowledgeable, highly trained investigators and sophisticated tools, both of which cost money.

Far easier to grab a few easy headlines by sitting in comfortable chairs night after night, sipping coffee, eating donuts and pretending to be "Sally-13-in-search-of-a-teacher," or "Michael-14-anxious-to-please-or-be-pleased."

The sad part is that online pedophilia is indeed a serious problem, and there is, without doubt, a crucial need to deal with global child pornography, exploitation and predation. But that's not what's going on here.

Philip Jenkins, distinguished professor of history and religious studies at Pennsylvania State University and author of a forthcoming book on the subject, describes child pornography as "vicious, sickening and utterly illegal sexual images depicting children of every age, from babies through young teenagers." Jenkins writes: "In vast quantities, these materials circulate through a global network of perhaps hundreds of thousands of individuals." And, he adds ominously, "law enforcement agencies do virtually nothing to control this traffic."

Sadly, that "virtually nothing" includes the Illinois High-Tech Criminal Investigations Unit, which, not surprisingly, finds it much more convenient to entrap than to investigate.

Fortunately, there are legal limits to the kind of entrapment used against Dr. X. In a 1992 ruling in the case of Jacobson v. U.S., the Supreme Court determined that government and law enforcement agencies may not "play on the weaknesses of an innocent party and beguile him into committing crimes which he otherwise would not have attempted."

Next week, we'll explore how Ryan, Margliano and thousands of law enforcement people make a living plucking the low-hanging fruit - fools or well-intentioned, naive people who hang in AOL chat rooms - while dangerous purveyors of child porn and other vicious criminals operate with impunity.