It's been a sick summer.

First, an HIV positive 11 year old Milwaukee girl gets gang raped by as many as 20 people including her 40 year old uncle, and now we hear about how three young men from Dodgeville and Ridgeway Wisconsin conspired to dig up a corpse for the purposes of having sex with it.

It's not looking good for our fair state.

But chalk this one up to twisted logic — conservatives are mumbling about how the rapists ought to get life in prison and the guys lusting after the corpses should be put to death.

Capital punishment for lusting after a corpse seems to be a stiff penalty.  These men aren't a danger to society — they're just sick.  They need some serious counseling and if they ever want to have a real life free of mockery, they need to move out of the state.

What is certain is that everybody in a small town knows your business.  For the rest of their lives, these young men are going to be known as the "corpse fuckers".  No one forgets a story like this.  There will be whispers in rural diners and watering holes for decades every time on of these guys goes into a bar for decades to come.

In the meantime, the 20 degenerates whose wandering thoughts of the 11 year old little girl led them to think she was anything other than the child she is, need to spend a little time in the Wisconsin prison system in cells but not until after they take their own HIV tests.  The best counseling they can receive is a reminder from their fellow prisoners on how child rapists are treated in prison.  A little alone time with a few incarcerated fathers who can't spend time with their own children would be in order.

As an interesting aside, the corpse the three men dug up was a victim of an automobile accident who the men spotted in an obituary.  Before heading to the cemetary, they stopped at the local Wal-Mart to pick up condoms.  What was the logic there?  Were they afraid they were going to get her pregnant or get a post-mortem STD?  Images of Ed Gein, a rural Wisconsin mass murderer who danced with corpses in the moonlight aren't that far away from these young guys.

Every year from here out, whenever I pass through these towns on my annual camping trip with friends to Governor Dodge State park, thoughts will turn away from mile markers and connect Ridgeway to these sickos.  As I'm driving down the highway 18 toward camping I pass different markers and naturally make connections.   Mt. Horeb (gnomes), cave of the mounds (beautiful subteranian caverns), Ridgeway (corpse fuckers) and Barneveld (horrific tornado).

Hopefully the summer of 2007 won't be as sick.