Back when he patrolled center field with a wad of chew and Lord knows what else in his system, Lenny Dykstra was a fan favorite. He could stroll disdainfully past autograph-pleading fans, roll his car over after a bachelor party and explain away his morphing from a Punch-and-Judy hitter to Popeye’s twin brother with a wink and a teeth-blackened smile.

“What’s he really like?” I would be asked time and again, and time and again, I would detail these and other, um, attributes. He could be surly, or even rude, I said. He was tough on the little people around the team — clubhouse guys, writers from smaller newspapers, and so on.

“But he’s a good guy, right?” would come the response, as if they weren’t listening to any of it.

None of it made him less popular. For one simple reason.

Lenny Dykstra was who you wanted him to be more than he actually was. You wanted him to be lovable. So he was.

Fifteen years later, after countless steroid scandals involving athletes, after arrests involving drugs, domestic abuse and even homicide, it is painfully clear that most fans would prefer not to know most of it. Moreover, their interest and outrage is proportional to the popularity of the athlete before the incident — or lack thereof.

Ray Lewis, who settled two civil suits following a post-Super Bowl brawl in 2000 that left two people dead, had his face placed on “Madden 2005.” Barry Bonds was considered a bad guy even before he was a cheat. He was a worse guy afterwards.

Jason Giambi, a perceived good guy, confessed (sort of) and was forgiven. Lance Armstrong survived cancer and raised millions to fight the disease, so those lab results from France have to be tainted, right? And who could believe, back in 2000, that Marion Jones knew anything about the steroids that her then-husband, C.J. Hunter, was caught ingesting?

I mean he always did it in the other room, right? Do we want to know?

There’s a nice little rewrite going on now, but people were at first outraged when a reporter spotted androstenedione in Mark McGwire’s locker during the great Home Run Chase of 1998.

Outraged at the reporter.

Obscuring the debate about whether the testosterone booster should be considered a steroid — it was sold over the counter at the time — was a debate on whether the reporter should have been snooping around in the first place. Angered, Cardinals manager Tony La Russa wanted the Associated Press punished for violating McGwire’s privacy.

At the time, reporters, players, owners — even commissioner Bud Selig — absolved the player of any wrongdoing.

The public demonization of Roger Clemens was easy: He doesn’t pitch for anyone anymore. Same with Jones, who wasn’t winning patriotic gold medals anymore when she copped a plea and went to prison. McGwire, in some ways as prickly as Bonds was, no longer needs to be presented in a softened light. We got what we wanted from him. He turned that summer of 1998 into a fantasy ride.

“What’s he really like?” I was asked often that summer, as I joined hundreds of other reporters following him from city to city.

He could be surly or rude, and tough on little guys, too. But the lesson learned from Dykstra, and reinforced each year since, is that it is far too often a rhetorical question.