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Joe Biden. Donald Trump. Bill Clinton. According to always-reliable social media, these men are pedophiles.

It doesn't stop with them, either. According to even foamier-at-the-mouth sources, nearly every world leader and celebrity took trips to "Epstein's Island" to have sex with children.

Do you want to know why pedophilia is an accusation leveled at so many, if not nearly all, high-level elected officials and celebrities?

It's because pedophilia is the last sin we have.

You can no longer ruin a man's political career by saying he's divorced or gay or that one of his grandfathers was Jewish.

You can't "accuse" a highly placed white woman of having some "secret" African American blood. Back in the old days, if you dug up one of her relatives who was darker than a Sicilian with a sunburn, she wasn't getting elected to anything.

Theft? Fraud? Those are just part of doing business. Drug use? I was young. I quit.

A lot of the things I listed above aren't really sins, but plenty of people used to believe they were sins, and some of them are still sins, but they're sins that have lost their wallop.

Most sins have lost their wallop.

If a woman is running for office in your congressional district, try derailing her campaign by whispering that she's divorced or that she has children by more than one man. Try it.

Fizzle.

In fact, her campaign may well be saying that her divorce and single motherhood are noble, that she has "struggled" and is therefore better suited to understand the plight of other strugglers.

We are left with pedophilia, which few people defend, although there are fringe groups striving for the "normalization" of sex between children and adults.

Treason? It's not only not a sin, but it may not even exist. Maybe it never existed. If it ever did exist, it existed like "high crimes and misdemeanors," a sin so common that a president is impeached for it every couple of months.

There remains pedophilia, and so every politician is accused of it when all other sins fail to have the proper reek of hellfire.

This is disrespectful to and painful for those who have been victimized by an older cousin, a parent, a mom's boyfriend or, classically, a beloved pastor or youth sports coach. I covered some of those trials when I was reporter, and I'd come out of the courtroom with blood in my eye and a great thirst for whiskey, no ice, no water.

There are people so desperate to accuse that, in a society where almost everything is permitted, they seize upon the one thing that is not.

It used to be common to see the spelling "paedophilia," but that has been largely changed to "pedophilia" for the benefit of illiterate accusers. You can't expect some drooling Facebook sage to use words with an "a" and an "e" right next to each other.

And it is the perfect accusation, since you are expected to prove your innocence, and your accuser doesn't have to provide much proof. Some badly Photoshopped pictures will do just fine.

"We don't have much milk left," my mother would say the morning of payday. "Don't put it all on your cereal. I need some for my coffee."

Same thing with sin. Don't use it all up. We don't have any more.

To find out more about Marc Dion, and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit www.creators.com. Dion's latest book, a collection of his best columns, is called "Mean Old Liberal." It is available in paperback from Amazon.com and for Nook, Kindle, and iBooks.