We told you the OJ Simpson book was a hoax

We told you back in November that it was pretty obvious that a ghostwriter had written the so-called OJ Simpson confessional, "If I Did It," and that former ReganBooks publisher Judith Regan paid the acquitted double murderer to put his name to it.

But the mainstream new media, chasing their own tails and sniffing each other's butts in pursuit of consensus, never followed up-- until today, as our pals at The New York Post's Page Six today quote a Simpson buddy saying: "O.J. told me Judith Regan approached him and said to him, 'Do you mind if we write a book and put your name on it?' I said, 'I don't care. You can write anything you want, as long as you pay me.'"

Promoter Norm Pardo adds: "O.J. would laugh, 'Can you believe they'd pay me to say I wrote something I didn't actually write?' A ghostwriter largely based the book on court transcripts from Simpson's trial."

We knew it was scam as soon as word leaked that Regan's former lover from her National Enquirer days, TV mystery writer Pablo Fenjes, had been hired to "help" Simpson with the book. Fenjves was a neightbor of murder victim Nicole Simpson-- and testified at Simpson's trial.

And as we wrote in November 2006:

Fenjves has made a living by using his imagination, he was involved in the Simpson case, he works in the imaginary crime genre, he conjures crime scenes for the small screen, and he writes in other people's voices. This sounds to be right up his alley. And Regan, the genius packager, could have seen this as a way to right all those wrongs she wrote about in her own very disturbing Drudge Report "confession."

What came first? OJ Simpson or the manuscript?

If I Did It could turn out to be a literary hoax right up there with James Frey's work.

The book was pulled before publication and Regan lost her job shortly after the fiasco.