Leona Gage died last week, and there are people who love her and will miss her. But Gage’s obituary would have never been deemed worth of mention in major newspapers had it not been for a series of lies she concocted in 1957 because “she needed the money.” She was Miss USA that year, until contest organizers discovered that, contrary to what she had said,  she wasn’t single ( a requirement then); wasn’t waiting “until she was 26” to have a boyfriend (she had been married twice at 14, and already had a child), and wasn’t 21…she was just 18. Though she was stripped of the title a day after winning it, she had achieved celebrity: many TV appearances followed, including one on the iconic “Ed Sullivan Show,” and she had a crack at an acting career, though it didn’t last. She was pretty, and she had no scruples. That was it.

Gage stumbled upon a path to success, if only temporarily in her case, that would become an art form by the 21st Century. Criminals, miscreants, liars. lowlifes and thugs like Eliot Spitzer, Dick Morris, Paris Hilton, Kato Kalin, Joey Buttafucco, Octomom, Tanya Harding, G. Gordon Liddy and too many others to mention have parlayed infamy into media deals and lucrative notoriety, corrupting the culture and everybody in it by showing that, unfortunately, many of us are more titillated by misconduct than repelled by it. Gage was one of the first in a long line of public personalities who stand for the proposition that dishonesty and unethical conduct will be rewarded, and may even be a useful shortcut to success.

She and those who have come after her make our lives a little seedier, our standards a little lower, our task of encouraging good ethical conduct a little harder. Gage’s death may be sad, but not as sad as her legacy, or the reason she has one.