In February of 2006, the Scoreboard bestowed Unethical Website status on The Alibi Network, a site which will facilitate an adulterous rendezvous with elaborate subterfuge, from fake certificates of attendance at phony out-of-town seminars, to e-mail confirmation of travel arrangements for business trips that never existed. Business must be good, for now the Alibi Network is under siege by a big international competitor. The web service is French (naturally) and is called "Alibila."

Aping its American cousin, Alibila provides adulterers with custom-made excuses that supposedly remove the risk of discovery out of cheating. It was founded this year by lady private-eye Regine Mourizard, and like its U.S. avatar, concocts invitations to imaginary weekend seminars, fake emergency phone calls from work, invitations to bogus reunions, weddings and funerals, and other scams to get middle-aged Casanovas out of the family homes and into those cheatin' arms.

Mourizard is either a free-thinker or a grandmaster at absurd rationalization, depending on whether you believe in ethics or not. She has been quoted as saying that her service is designed to protect families by allowing adulterers to live their flings undetected.

"If the alibi is well done and the spouse doesn't suspect anything, this can sometimes save marriages," Mourizard told The Associated Press in a telephone interview.

Right, Regine. And poisoning dinner can actually make it more nutritious. Tell us another!

Mourizard concocts just the right excuse for prospective clients, who use the web site to request an alibi for a specific date and time. She devises the elaborate alibi event while her computer specialist assistant draws up fake brochures, restaurant and hotel bills, receipts and other documents to get the cheater out the door without raising any suspicion. After the rendezvous, there are T-shirts, key chains, and other custom-designed mementos---even fake photos--- to support what Mourizard calls "little white lies." You know…those harmless, innocent white lies that betray loved ones and enable one to undermine the foundation of families.

A fascinating theme throughout many unethical websites is the logical gymnastics these sites go through to create the fiction that there is nothing really wrong with their services---that somehow they really are doing a good thing. Do sites like Alibila genuinely believe their own deceptions? Or are they cynically trying to goose their market by providing vulnerable potential clients sufficient moral uncertainty that they become paying users? Are you less unethical if you don't understand how wrong you are?

Perhaps. In this case, it doesn't matter. Websites that assist adultery are unequivocally unethical, in any language.