Wake the kids and gather them around the computer screen, because they need to learn this important lesson: If you want to be a celebrity and have your major character flaws and social irresponsibility laughed off, be a pre-teen pop music or movie star instead of a pro athlete. Then, your criminal behavior won't be treated like a national crisis and a poor example for the youth -- it will be played for yuks and giggles.

For example: this report, filed by CNN (!) and aired this morning on Channel 45's morning news show. It's about Lindsay Lohan's arrest a couple of days ago. Sort of. You'd think it was a promo for her next movie, about a wild, free-spirited teen who just can't stay out of trouble, the little tow-headed scamp.

What it is about, is how Madame Tussaud's Wax Museum dressed her figure in prison stripes, with fans posing next to it. And how her arrest made her cancel her appearance on Leno, so that Rob Schneider could imitate her. And about how her clever fashion accessory, the ankle-bracelet alcohol monitor, not only wasn't as cute as you'd think, but apparently wasn't very effective. And how fans in the street just can't keep their out-of-control young bombshells straight -- they couldn't pick Lohan out of a collection of mugs of Paris, Britney and Nicole. And how her police mug shot at least wasn't as crazed-looking as James Brown's or Nick Nolte's.

Knee-slapping fun all around!

And this is for a barely 21-year-old multiple offender and repeat-rehab failure (she had just gotten sprung less than two weeks ago) who was caught speeding down a California highway in pursuit of her ex-personal assistant's mother, drunk and with cocaine in her pocket, according to police. Imagine if she had plowed into a family's minivan and killed them all. It would've been a laff riot!

Better yet -- imagine if (wink-wink, nudge-nudge) she had been caught owning a house where dogs were trained to fight to the death and were electrocuted, hanged, drowned and slammed to the ground when they lost? Oh, the fun a cable news network could have with those shenanigans! Girls gone wild, part XXVII, you know what I mean?

How the family of the Worldwide Leader hasn't thought of this is amazing. Lighten up the grave, gravity-laden Michael Vick coverage with a zany montage of his chuckle-inducing bouts with the boys in blue. Play up how he's just a fast-living, freewheeling ingénue whose hijinks while trying to shake his goody-two-shoes image gets eaten up by his always-adoring fans. What a crack-up that would be!

Somewhere, Darryl Strawberry (not to mention generations of players hit with moralizing finger-wagging and lecturing before and after him) is watching this all and grimacing.

So, remember: You can act 12 different kinds of fool and come up with as many creative ways to break laws as your illegal substance-addled mind can conceive, and a large part of the public (and, shamefully, media) will smirk, joke and chuckle at your plight. As long as you're cute enough, blond enough and precocious enough, that is. Just don't pick up a ball and try any of that, because you'll then become the scourge of decent society and be vilified like you'd never imagine.

Now that I think of it, wouldn't that be a great movie -- a new version of "Freaky Friday,'' one of Lohan's signature flicks, except with Vick playing the Jamie Lee Curtis role? Through some kind of kooky magic trick, Vick and Lohan switch bodies and personalities for a day, so that Vick sees what it's like to live her life, and Lohan gets to live his life. He can get the fluffy celeb treatment when he screws up, and she can get called a thug and a lowlife and a piece of human garbage and a word that starts with "n'', and have people proclaim that because of her, they'll never spend another dime on movies again, because the whole business is full of people like her who'd be in the penitentiary if they weren't lucky enough to be able to recite some lines in front of a camera.

I'd camp out on line to get a ticket to that.