In a shockingly harebrained legal “strategy,” the Pennsylvania lawyer representing accused child molester Jerry Sandusky, the former Penn State football coach, allowed his client to go on national TV last night and cop to showering with young boys.

Attorney Joseph Amendola sat mute by Bob Costas’s elbow yesterday as the NBC sportscaster asked Sandusky, over the phone, about his shower room escapades with young boys. Amendola allowed his client to admit that he “horsed around with kids,” engaged in towel snapping, and “touched their legs.”

He did all this, Sandusky assured Costas, “without intent of sexual content.”

Amendola, 63, allowed his client to be questioned about a 1998 incident in which a woman confronted him about inappropriate contact Sandusky allegedly had with her son during a shower. In a conversation overheard by police, Sandusky reportedly said that his genitals may have touched the woman’s son. “What I did say,” Sandusky told Costas in reference to the boy, “was that if he felt that way then I was wrong.”

The lawyer also sat by as the 67-year-old Sandusky took a circuitous route--lasting nearly 20 seconds--to a denial that he was sexually attracted to young boys.

During an appearance this morning on the Today Show, when Amendola was asked why his client kept on showering with boys (even after one child’s mother complained about the practice), the solo practitioner acknowledged that Sandusky (pictured below) “didn’t use a whole lot of common sense” and should have ceased the soapy practice.

After noting that showering with children doesn’t make Sandusky guilty, Amendola stated, “Is it possible that Jerry did all these things? Of course. And if he did, they’re the most serious types of offenses that anyone could commit upon children. And he should be punished accordingly.”

That’s right, Amendola himself raised the possibility that his own client was, in fact, a monstrous child molester. He added, of course, “But what if he didn’t? What if he is innocent? And his life will never be the same…as the lives of the people at Penn State.”

The “But what if he didn’t?” defense approach--which never dawned on Clarence Darrow--appears unique to Amendola, a Penn State grad who went to Georgetown Law School.