Could this be the real reason for Tiger Woods' car wreck? A Chinese television station, unwilling to wait for Tiger and his wife, Elin Nordegren, to stop clamming up, put together their own computer-graphic Sims-style version of how the golf star wrecked his car at around 2 a.m. Friday.

Sure, it's important to remember this video is a fabrication, based on pure speculation. It shows an argument between Woods and his wife, Elin Nordegren, over his alleged affair with New York party planner Rachel Uchitel -- an affair that both Uchitel and Woods deny.

Nordegren slaps him. Woods tries to drive away. His wife chases him with a golf club, whacking his Escalade's rear window. He looks back in shock, hits a fire hydrant and careens into a tree.  

In the real world, Woods admits to "transgressions" and "personal sins" but denies as "utterly false and malicious" tabloid reports that "physical violence played any role in the car accident."

In Woods' defense, videos like this show why American TV stations avoid such simulations. We humans tend, consciously or unconsciously, to give too much credibility to what we have seen on a screen.

I remember a time an American city's pitch for the Olympics was viewed nationwide as a national issue of patriotic pride in America, an issue that transcended partisan politics. Now, as the videos above and below illustrate, that seems so-o-o-o last century.

UPDATE: The Tribune's Phil Hersh explains here better than anybody I've read how the politics of the IOC decision were Olympian, not Republican.

UPDATE 2: For my own humble take on the IOC's rejection of Chicago's bid ("Let the games begin -- somewhere else!..."), see today's CLARENCE PAGE column here.

 You have to hand it to Mark Sanford.  As far as we know, he did not fool around like Bill Clinton with an intern in his government office.
Nor did he slip off to a fancy Washington hotel room with an exceedingly high-priced New Jersey hooker like New York’s former law-’n’-order  Democratic Gov. Eliot Spitzer.
 No, South Carolina’s Republican governor flew all the way to Buenos Aires to be with his sweetie, which immediate brought to mind memories of another Argentinian who gained instant fame in 1974 as the main squeeze, not counting his wife, of a powerful American politician and presidential hopeful.
 Arkansas Democrat Wilbur Mills wielded great power as chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee.  Like Sanford, he was a contender in 1972 for his party’s presidential nomination.
That was before U.S. Park Police found him with his face cut one night in October 1974 after they stopped his speeding car near the Tidal Basin at 2 a.m.
Out of his car jumped Ms. Annabelle Battistella, a.k.a. Fanne Foxe, a stripper known as the “the Argentine Firecracker” at Washington's Silver Slipper club on 13th Street.