The King of Pop pays his $3 million bail and he’s off to — where else? — Sin City, Las Vegas.

What about the parents of the kid whom police charge Michael Jackson abused at his Neverland Ranch?

They should be charged as criminal co-conspirators. No right-thinking mother or father would leave a child to spend the night with a certified freak who a decade ago was accused of molesting a 13-year-old boy and reportedly paid the family as much as $15 million to shut that kid up.

The scene last week was reminiscent of O.J. Simpson fleeing police in that white Bronco after his ex-wife and a male friend were found stabbed to death. There was Jacko Thursday, having been booked and photographed in all his lipsticked glory, riding in a black SUV under police escort to head back to Vegas to work on a video.

OK, OK. This is America. One is innocent until proven guilty in court. Authorities in Santa Barbara, Calif., have sealed the investigative record until Jackson’s arraignment in January. All we know is that Jackson has been charged with committing “lewd and lascivious” acts on a child under 14.

Forget the charges. We know in our collective gut that Jackson is a strange dude. Parents are supposed to be the front line of defense to protect their children from harm. Jackson is, if nothing else, a 45-year-old man whose fame and fortune and his own laments about his upbringing with an abusive father make him a sad and bizarre character.

So bizarre that he is raising his three children (borne by a woman who rarely sees them) as if they were living under Afghanistan’s Taliban regime. Jackson covers their little faces with see-through cloth to “protect” them from the evil eye of the cameras in public.

In a British interview with Jackson that ABC aired in February, the singer defended sleeping with other people’s kids in his bed because he had their parents’ permission.

“The most loving thing to do is to share your bed with someone. It’s a beautiful thing,” Jackson said in his mini-me voice. It was “disgusting,” he said, that anyone would think of sex in that context.

Surely those of us who grew up awed with Jackson’s incredible talent are disgusted. This is a guy who has dangled one of his face-covered babies off a balcony in Germany to show him off to the crowd below. How sane is that?

To hear Jackson’s brother Jermaine tell CNN Thursday that the case against the surgically challenged, pale-faced former child singer (remember when he was black?) is “nothing but a modern-day lynching” amuses. In denial, Jermaine says Michael “is not eccentric.” No, he’s beyond that.

A Jackson family lawyer says these latest charges involve a 12-year-old boy, a cancer patient whom the Moonwalker befriended at a children’s hospital.

The boy’s father lost custody of his three kids because he was accused of beating two of them. The boy’s mother, meanwhile, allowed her son to sleep with Jackson at Neverland. Her ex-husband calls it “poor judgment.” How about criminal?

Maybe money-grubbing parents would prey on an innocent, developmentally arrested multimillionaire who, like the imaginary Peter Pan, simply wants to be a kid and never grow up.

Maybe Jackson wouldn’t hurt a rat. Maybe this is just a plot by an angry prosecutor Captain Hook who didn’t get to take Jackson down a decade ago and now wants to destroy him just as his greatest hits album goes on sale.

Yeah, and soon they’ll be giving away Neverland, too.

Myriam Marquez is an editorial page columnist for the Orlando Sentinel. Her e-mail address is

mmarquez@orlandosentinel.com.