After it broke late yesterday that Roger Clemens's trainer Brian McNamee may have lied to authorities about an alleged rape in 2001, it'd only be natural to wonder how truthful his current testimony about the pitcher really is.

After all, the St. Petersburg police records that were released yesterday were very detailed about what McNamee did in 2001, and how he allegedly lied about the incident. The case was eventually dropped, despite the fact that police were confident that McNamee had committed rape.

Clemens is already using this as fodder that McNamee is a liar and can’t be trusted.

As heinous an act as McNamee may have committed in 2001, that doesn't mean his testimony about Clemens in the Mitchell Report should fall flat.

People with questionable backgrounds and questionable motives can indeed tell the truth.

The problem is that, for the most part, we prefer the individuals that expose people like Clemens to be stand-up people - not alleged rapists who are looking to escape jail time for providing illegal drugs to athletes.
But the truth is that if we just look back in time, we find that many people who exposed cheats and liars were not exactly pure of heart themselves.

Jose Canseco was derided for being a crackpot out for vengeance when he started spouting off names of people with whom he had used steroids when his career abruptly ended. On one level, Canseco was out for vengeance, but on another more important level, he was telling the truth. His best catch was likely Rafael Palmeiro, a player who I never would have guessed was on steroids. Palmeiro, for the most part a stand-up guy, even stood before Congress and shook his finger saying he'd never used steroids. Yet he had been. We had been fooled and Jose had indeed been right.

Even more serious than Canseco and Steroidgate was Watergate, where we assumed for years that Deep Throat was a diligent U.S. citizen who stepped forward anonymously to help take down Nixon. Instead it was Deputy Director Mark Felt, who was basically mad that Nixon didn't make him head of the FBI.

There are a variety of reasons why people with murky backgrounds and somewhat questionable intentions begin to make the truth known. They're facing jail time. They're mad they didn't get to play longer. They want revenge for not getting a promotion.

But despite those less than ideal reasons, they're still telling the truth.

For McNamee, he provided Mitchell with page after page of excruciating detail as to how he injected Clemens. If he's found to be lying, he'll be going to prison for perjury. And when confronted by Clemens on the phone, he didn't change his story either.

And let's remember that Andy Pettitte, one of McNamee's clients, also admitted to using HGH, lending more credibility to McNamee.

The point is that even though McNamee may have raped a woman in 2001, that isn't the issue, despite what Clemens may say.

What matters is McNamee's testimony in the Mitchell Report and his refusal to back down from it, thereby making it clear what Clemens was doing - steroids.