There’s no excusing what Glass did. As a young staff writer at The New Republic in the mid-1990s, Glass wrote some 42 stories that were either partly or wholly made up. When he was drummed out of the profession, I applauded. What’s hard to fathom is why, of all the journalistic fraudsters over the past decades, his is the story that just won’t go away.

It’s been told in Vanity Fair, and in the 2003 movie Shattered Glass. When Glass tried to gain admission to the California bar in 2010 (the California Supreme Court ultimately denied his application), it generated a whole new round of nasty stories, with the press critic Jack Shafer calling him “a whiny excuse-maker.” When The New Republic celebrated its 100th anniversary in 2014, it sent Hanna Rosin, once a close friend, to interview Glass and retell the sordid tale. Just last year, Washingtonian magazine ran an “oral history” of the making of Shattered Glass. I mean, seriously? ...

We like to think of ourselves as a nation that believes in redemption. Michael Milken is today a “philanthropist” instead of a convicted felon. (Also: Donald Trump pardoned him.) After doing time for insider trading, Martha Stewart is a national treasure. The quarterback Michael Vick was convicted of running a dog-fighting ring—and became the NFL’s comeback player of the year after he got out of prison. The 1969 Chappaquiddick scandal hung over Ted Kennedy for years, but by the time of his death in 2009, he was heralded as a great statesman. Like these bad actors, Stephen Glass deserves a second act that trumps the terrible mistakes of his past. What The Connector shows is that, sadly, it’s never going to happen.