Armstrong in October 2012. (Getty Images/Tom Pennington)

Sally Jenkins likes Lance Armstrong, has always liked him. Not the “fairy-tale prince”—the once-seven-time Tour de France winner who shacked up with Sheryl Crow—but the “real him,” aka the cancer patient.

That would be fine, if Jenkins’ lede weren’t undone by the rest of her column yesterday. Jenkins, The Washington Post’s longtime New York-based sports columnist, finally addressed the subject Post readers and cycling fans have been waiting for her to tackle: Lance Armstrong, who earlier this year said he would not contest charges that he used banned substances and was unceremoniously stripped of the Tour de France victories he accrued between 1999 and 2005.

Jenkins, of course, is also the co-author on Armstrong’s books, 2000’s It’s Not About the Bike: My Journey Back to Life and its 2003 sequel, Every Second Counts. But when Armstrong was charged by the U.S. Anti-Doping Agency in June of using performance-enhancing drugs and encouraging his teammates to do likewise, and banned from cycling in August, Jenkins was almost silent. Save a critique of USADA and its international counterpart, the World Anti-Doping Agency, Jenkins has said nothing publicly about Armstrong. In fact, in October, she told Jim Romenesko she was too busy to even begin reading the USADA report.

Well, apparently she’s finally read it, or at least noticed the din. Hell, if Vernon Loeb can offer his confessional about David Petraeus and Paula Broadwell, surely Jenkins can come clean about Armstrong.

But in the ways Jenkins writes that she is “not angry at Lance” does not excuse the so-called real Armstrong. It’s just more hagiography of a man who made a wondrous medical recovery—very admirable, to be sure—and proceeded to win a bunch of bike races. The problem, though, is that Armstrong cheated, and Jenkins doesn’t care.

Maybe I’m not angry at Lance because, though I hoped he was clean, it’s simply not shocking or enraging to learn that he was like all the other cyclists who sought a medical advantage in riding up the faces of mountains. Or because I’ve long believed that what athletes put in their bodies should be a matter of personal conscience, not police actions—when we demand unhealthy, even death-defying extremes of them for our entertainment, it seems the height of hypocrisy to then dictate what’s good for them.

There are two things here. First, Armstrong’s drug use is forgivable because all the other cyclists were doing it. Look, we all encounter fads in our life—slap bracelets, ring pops, Magic: The Gathering card collections—but just because all the other kids are doing it doesn’t make it right.

Then there is Jenkins’ second excuse (in this section alone). Sure, violations of sport are not necessarily violations of the law, and there is a sometimes unhealthy public demand for more action more quickly. There is perhaps no better recent example of this than Derek Boogaard, an NHL forward who died last year from a drug overdose while recovering from a concussion brought on by a grueling history of fistfights, which he was trained to seek out. But the gladiatorial explanation is not sufficient in Armstrong’s case. Professional sports are, ostensibly, highly self-governed, and though steroid and stimulant is widespread, it is better for it to be publicly exposed than privately rued. Major League Baseball is far better for having former Sen. George Mitchell’s report on steroid use in the open than it is had it allowed Roger Clemens and Alex Rodriguez to (maybe) wallow in mental anguish.

Oh, and then Jenkins forgives herself for not asking Armstrong to ‘fess up:

And because, much as I would have liked a personal or public confession from him, I suspect that he understood what the price of it would be, and found the stakes too high to call up his friend at The Washington Post and bring it all down on his head.

Actually, Sally, that’s kind of your job.

Jenkins continues to take issue with USADA and WADA. “Shouldn’t an organization with the initials U.S. in front of it have to follow due process?” she asks. Well, while that might be nice, USADA, as a non-governmental body, isn’t required to follow due process. U.S. Airways, which follows the same naming format, isn’t bound by the Fifth Amendment, either. Acronyms can be hard.

Were there issues with the USADA report, as Jenkins insists? Sure, the free pass Floyd Landis, another discredited cyclist, earned in exchange for testifying against Armstrong, is a little fishy. But then comes Jenkins’ dubious attitude toward anti-doping missions writ large:

Maybe I’m not angry at Lance because for two decades now I’ve had serious questions about the wisdom and fairness of the “anti-doping” effort, which consists of criminalizing and demonizing athletes for what boils down to using medications without a prescription, as if they are heroin dealers. And I’m confused as to why using cortisone as an anti-inflammatory in a 2,000-mile race is cheating, and I wonder why putting your own blood back into your body is the crime of the century.

OK, so it actually is a crime to use certain medications without a prescription, whether or not you ride a bike for money and glory. And is there anything wrong on paper with blood re-infusion? No, I suppose not, unless, say, it’s been several years since you beat cancer and you’re looking for a boost ahead of a big cycling race, as Armstrong did in 2003. Crime of the century? Don’t get so dramatic. But it still gave Armstrong—and who knows how many other cyclists—a competitive edge over the ones trying to play honestly.

Also, consider Jenkins’ kicker in this paragraph:

And because there are offenses in sport that seem far, far worse to me. Like say, putting rapists on your college football team.

First of all, that’s a hell of a false equivalency to try to make us argue. But as long as we’re on the topic of allowing rapists on your college football team, I seem to remember Jenkins going pretty soft on Joe Paterno in the last interview the longtime Penn State coach gave after his downfall.

Maybe Sally Jenkins isn’t mad at Lance Armstrong because, in her words, she doesn’t “understand those people who are bitterly angry to discover that he is not Santa Claus.” But her defense of Armstrong hinges on excusing him from his athletic wrongdoings by holding up his medical history and charitable work. Those columns of Armstrong’s life aren’t separate, but nor are they completely wedded. Yeah, Armstrong still visits sick kids in the hospital, and that’s great.

“I don’t just like Lance Armstrong for that. I love him for it,” Jenkins writes.

Seems like she loves the rest of him, too. Fairy-tale Lance lives on.