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Dr. Phil lands coveted interview with Te’o hoax mastermind, shark officially jumped

If we needed one sentence to really show how far the Manti Te'o hoax story has gone off the rails, this one is as good as any:

TMZ is reporting that Dr. Phil has landed the coveted first interview with Ronaiah Tuiasosopo, the man who allegedly created the hoax of Manti Te'o's fake girlfriend and may or may not have impersonated a woman's voice on the phone to sell the scheme.

Yep. This is actually news.

TMZ, the celebrity gossip source, was the first to report that Dr. Phil McGraw - a onetime regular guest of Oprah Winfrey who parlayed that into his own "Dr. Phil" daytime show - has already talked to Tuiasosopo.

According to TMZ, Dr. Phil and Tuiasosopo sat down for several hours for an on-camera interview, after they watched Katie Couric talk to Te'o about the hoax.

These are sentences I never would have guessed at the beginning of this month I'd ever be writing on a college football blog.

While Te'o and others have said Tuiasosopo has confessed to being behind the hoax, he has not spoken publicly. TMZ didn't have any details of the Dr. Phil interview, but the likely points of conversation will be if he in fact did it, why he did it, how he kept the scam going, who else was involved and hopefully if he can impersonate the voice of a woman, as the lawyer said he did for more than 1,000 hours on the phone. And it'll probably be intertwined with some self-help advice, or whatever Dr. Phil does on his show (per Dr. Phil's website, Friday's show topic is "My In-Laws Tried to Kill Me!" and there's a link for people who want to be on the show to click that asks, "Obsessed with an inanimate object?" so we will assume this interview will be of the highest journalistic quality).

Whatever Tuiasosopo says, we're just waiting for "The Maury Show" to get involved with this story at some point.

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