The mourning period that followed Ronald Reagan’s death three years ago, in which even his fiercest critics agreed to temporarily bite their tongues, clearly won’t apply to the recently deceased Rev. Jerry Falwell. His corpse had barely turned cold before the media erupted into a debate over the demagogue’s true legacy.

It was bound to happen. Whenever the nation experiences an orgy of hypocrisy and self-righteousness like the Don Imus affair, it so often turns out that a leader of some holy crusade lives in the proverbial glass house.

And so it was when the nation’s self-appointed religious maven from the left, Rev. Al Sharpton, seeking as always to outdo the fundamentalists on the right, found himself in precisely the same boat in which he’d placed, just a few short weeks ago, the hapless radio shock-jock.

“Ducking for cover,” roared the headline on page 3 of the May 1st Boston Herald. It would have been an appropriate headline for a story on the state of daily life in Baghdad, where a slew of recent bombings claimed the lives of more than 1,600 Iraqi civilians. Instead, the headline refers to the dozens of disgraced D.