I was wrong. I admit it. Last week I said the St. James debacle couldn’t get any worse. Well it has, and it looks like those who voted to sell the hotel to a developer at a 90 percent discount from its appraised price are scrambling to get egg off their faces.

The majority of the council [Benjamin, Bowie, Crenshaw, Johnson, Keith and Tucker] voted to sell the St. James to Kenneth Moore, a hotel and real estate developer, who had presented the council with a deal they apparently couldn’t refuse — an offer to purchase the St. James for $100,000, a fraction of its appraised price, with a stipulation that he would invest $4.5 million to renovate the hotel.

Sounds good on paper, right? Indeed. What Moore failed to tell the council is he has a criminal history that includes identity theft, and some failed financial ventures that resulted in bankruptcies.

Shockingly, even though Moore attended several council meetings over a period of months, apparently nobody thought to look into Moore’s business dealings to see if any red flags popped up.

I’ll be the first to admit that people make mistakes. And sometimes they make big ones, including scrapes with the law, and they recover just fine. As for bankruptcies, apparently those aren’t that big of a deal, either. Just ask any Trump supporter.

But what irks me, and should irk you, is that after all the poor decisions the past two administrations have made with the St. James, they were a whisper away from giving a convicted felon the deal of the century on a piece of property you and I own, and they didn’t even know it because they failed to do their homework.

Keith, who heads the council’s St. James committee, said the council only voted to accept Moore’s offer, which was the impetus they needed to begin vetting Moore, and that they’d hired a “big attorney” to do it. As my daddy would say, that sounds a little “bass akward” to me.

What they should have done is uphold the fiduciary responsibility they have to the taxpayers of this community, done their homework first, and not make them, and as an extension of them, us, look like a bunch of rubes.

The fallout is still thick, but what’s funny is there are some council people who claim our reporting of their incompetence related to this deal is political in nature. That we somehow reported this as a way to make some of them look bad ahead of the runoff election is laughable. They do a good enough job of that on their own.

In the spirit of transparency, we would have reported on Moore’s background earlier, but we had a major special section to complete and an election to cover. What we knew we had to do was get this story out before the council dug this hole any deeper — and we did.

So what’s next? Who knows, and I hesitate to ask this question again, but it can’t get any worse, can it?