“I am a weasel, a traitor, a sell-out and every bad word you can throw at me… but as of today, I am free, and I am ready to tell my story, which I wasn’t able to fully do for the previous 36 hours.”

–—Joe Moto, upon getting his walking papers at Fox News. Moto, a producer on the O’Reilly show, had been sending anti-Fox posts to the gossipy and ethics-free website Gawker, denigrating the company that was paying his salary. His work as the “Fox Mole” didn’t last long, as he was discovered and fired after only two undercover posts.

Joe Moto, while at Fox News

Joe Moto is a fick.* He can’t justify his conduct, which is as low as it gets. In his statement above, which is part of his first post-Fox column, he acknowledges that he has no ethical argument left to him for his disloyal, cowardly breach of an employer’s trust, but informs the world that he intends to cash in anyway. I will say this clearly: anyone who ever hires this guy for any job, from working in TV to yard work, is insane.

Moto can’t even claim to be a whistle-blower. His undercover work for Gawker—and I am wrestling the little devil on my shoulder into submission to avoid hoping that Gawker has a raft of aspiring ficks on its own payroll, ready to write similar bile about their employer for TMZ—wasn’t even substantive. His first exposé was about obnoxious posts on the Fox News website and utter nonsense suggesting that the fact that Romney and his wife ride horses makes Republican criticism of Obama’s golfing hypocritical. His second was about the condition of Fox’s bathrooms. In the main, what was mostly damaging to Fox in Moto’s writing was his sneering contempt and nastiness, raising serious questions about any network that would hire such a creep.

Moto is a nightmare employee, and every organization has them. Gawker is despicable for giving such a low-life a platform (but we knew Gawker was despicable); Moto is considerably worse. His rationalization, from his first post, was this:

“The plan was simple: get hired, keep my head down and my views to myself, work for a few months, build my resume, then eventually hop to a new job that didn’t make me cringe every morning when I looked in the mirror.

“That was years ago. My cringe muscles have turned into crow’s feet. The ten resumes a month I was sending out dwindled into five, then two, then one, then zero. No one wants me. I’m blacklisted.

“I work at Fox News Channel.”

Here’s a useful ethics tip, Leroy—I mean, Joe: if your job causes you to cringe when you look in the mirror, the proper response is to find another job. And don’t tell us you couldn’t because you were “black-listed” simply for working at Fox News (though if that were true, you had a legitimate ethics story to report on and it didn’t relate to Fox at all.) You couldn’t find another job because you’re an untrustworthy fick, and most interviewers can sense such serious character flaws when you begin trashing the company you’re working for. They know if you do it to Fox, you’ll do it to them.

But good luck, Joe. At least you’re working for an organization that fits your ethical instincts.

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* Although Gawker says he’s a mole, and he calls himself a weasel.