By JOHN MICHAEL

Guest Columnist

Text messaging is a great invention.

An even better invention is “text-flirting” — a method of technological courtship.

It’s great! It puts everyone at the height of their game, it gives you the ability to take your time and think of witty responses instead of just blurting out something idiotic into a telephone, which usually causes the dreaded awkward silence, which in turn leads to lots of “umms” and “aahs” and inevitably results in you not scoring.

Anyway, texting in the past couple years has really seemed to become a lot more popular. It seems so natural nowadays to just send a text message in place of a phone call. But I got a hunch that Kwame is nostalgic for the good old days before text-flirting when we used to just spit game over the phone.

To think that all of Kwame’s perverted, sexually charged, electronic messages have been printed, and stored in a manila folder somewhere in a detective’s office makes me extremely curious.

I wonder what Kwame’s text game is like: Is he that low-key type of seducer that softly and secretly woos his lover into his realm? Does he penetrate her soul with an intellectual sense of humor? Or is he a raunchy sexual deviant who floods his lover’s ears with erotic and animalistic remarks?

I wonder if he was the corny type and used the term “chief of staff” as sexual innuendo — I sure would have.

Although some take it seriously, I find it much better to laugh about. Kwame is a joke. His apology was a joke.

If you thought Kwame was a filthy scumbag man-whore before his speech, you thought he was a filthy scumbag man-whore with above-average rhetoric skills after his speech. The only thing it did was provide some peace of mind for his supporters.

Anyone could have told you exactly how the speech was going to sound, and anyone with an education could have written it and gotten across the same message.

Like all face-saving public addresses, the entire thing was a farce; a big phony scripted show, with his wife sitting there holding his hand, acting civil. I’m sure deep inside the only thing her hands wanted to clasp was his neck! When she spoke, she even sort of blinked or flinched when she said she loved him.

She held her gaze at him an extra second to make it look more real, but it came across as nothing but pure, bottled-up spite! Mrs. Kilpatrick looked as if she was on the verge of going ballistic throughout the whole speech.

But the thing that makes me most upset is that public speeches are forced.

The way the media promotes matters involving a public official’s personal life must be addressed.

Remember the fuss back when Dick Cheney shot his hunting companion? People wanted a speech about it and he refused on the grounds that it had nothing to do with his job as vice president. The media lashed out and claimed that the Bush administration had no respect for the media and the public, but, in fact, this was not the case.

Dick just believed that it was a personal matter and that accidentally shooting a friend of his had nothing to do with American politics. And it doesn’t.

The mayor screwing around with his work staff does not affect the city of Detroit. The only people who really suffer are his wife and kids.

The sex life of our mayor really should not matter to anyone besides his family. But, of course, the media makes it matter more than anything poor Kwame’s ever done.

Besides adding another stain on his already tainted character, this “Sex, Lies, and Texting” scandal does nothing but improve local news ratings.

Many men cheat on their wives and have affairs. All marriages have problems. The affair doesn’t directly affect his job as a mayor, just as it wouldn’t if he was a used car salesman.

It’s only a big deal because he’s the mayor of a struggling city.

I personally could care less who Kwame is sleeping with.

Yet even though Kwame has done a lot for the city economically, people will only remember him for his scandalous and selfish behavior.

That’s just the way things work. I guess Kwame should have thought about that before he started text flirting.