When I was six or seven years old, I took a little coin purse that did not belong to me from the school lost-and-found. It was a really cool leather model with a wrist band, and it was just sitting there being wasted.

I took it because I wanted it. The teacher didn't exactly grill me about my proprietary rights, so it was a pretty easy heist.

But let me assure you, I did nothing wrong.

I mean, I knew the purse wasn't mine, which meant it had to be someone else's. But it's not like I stuck a cap gun in some girl's ribs and told her to hand over the goods. I just dipped into a box of stuff that nobody else seemed to want in order to give an orphaned pouch a good home.

On the other hand, I knew it was morally indefensible, not to mention illegal, and that I would be in trouble if the rightful owner ever saw me with it. But that's totally unrelated to why I stuck it in the bottom of my sock drawer and never once used it, or even took it out to look at it. The act of hiding it away was just a coincidence.

So I totally got it when then-Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich, former state Sen. Vincent J. Fumo and U.S. Sen. Roland Burris, in the midst of their respective scandals, all insisted they'd done nothing wrong.

Mr. Blagojevich, of course, had been caught on tape by federal investigators talking about selling President-elect Barack Obama's Senate seat to the highest bidder. This prompted the state legislature to impeach him.

Throughout the drama, Mr. Blagojevich repeatedly told anyone who would listen, "I have done nothing wrong."

The then-governor refused to attend his own trial, preferring to heap scorn on his enemies in a series of bizarre TV talk-show appearances. But at closing arguments, he ducked inside for a final statement.

"You haven't proved a crime, and you can't because it didn't happen," he told the lawmakers, who proceeded to vote him out of office unanimously.

Mr. Fumo, for years the most powerful Democrat in the Pennsylvania Legislature, has admitted to a number of things alleged by federal prosecutors in his five-month fraud and corruption trial in Philadelphia.

A partial list of the disclosures so far are that Mr. Fumo had staffers do personal and political work for him on state time, pressured Peco Energy Co. for a $17 million donation to a South Philadelphia charity he founded, charged the charity for $63,000 worth of power tools and $250,000 in political polling, got free yacht trips from the Philadelphia Seaport Museum, got a private investigator to spy on his ex-girlfriend, hacked the e-mail of his estranged daughter and accepted a $1 million gift from a multi-millionaire friend and political supporter but never disclosed it on any financial forms.

On the stand, Mr. Fumo acknowledged that the spying was a bad idea. But in the other cases, he said he either did what other politicians do, took only what he deserved, or, in the case of the $1 million gift, didn't report it because the law didn't require it. In other words, he made a few mistakes on a personal level, but in terms of his official behavior, he'd done nothing wrong.

As for Mr. Burris, the former Illinois legislator whom Mr. Blagojevich eventually named to succeed Mr. Obama, he'd insisted from the get-go that there was no pay-to-play in his appointment. The U.S. Senate seated him reluctantly because there were no legal grounds to keep him out. Only then did he admit that his patron had asked him to raise money for him, and that he had tried and failed to do so. He would have told his Senate questioners about it if they'd given him a chance, he said, but the opportunity just didn't present itself.

Nor did he tell anyone that Mr. Blagovich had given his son a job in his administration, a fact that came out last week. Once again, the calls are coming for Mr. Burris to resign his seat. But on Tuesday, after Mr. Obama's first address to a joint session of Congress, the senator approached Illinois Rep. Jesse Jackson Jr., who had also been in the running for the Senate seat, and said, "I did nothing wrong."

Given my own record as an unindicted thief, I guess I should have more sympathy for these men. But here's the part I can't get over. Even as a first-grader, I knew better than to flaunt my ill-gotten gains -- not only for fear of getting pinched, but also because I was ashamed of myself. Regardless of whether any of the current trio of deniers winds up being convicted of breaking laws, the utter lack of shame is stunning.

Now it looks like we're going to have to come up with a new phrase for protesting one's innocence. "I did nothing wrong" has become the equivalent of "Yeah, I did it. So what?"

This is too bad, because there are plenty of people out there who did not, in fact, do what they've been accused of going. Sometimes, they didn't do what they've been convicted, sentenced and served time for doing. If such folks are going to defend themselves without provoking guffaws, they'll have to find novel ways to express the thought.

"Absolutely 100 percent not guilty" is ruined. So is "I am not a crook" and "I did not have sex with that woman." I can't come up with anything better at the moment, but something tells me that someone else will before long.