Must I also get in on the gabfest about Anna Nicole Smith? Sigh! When it comes to greedy goons sniffing around nearly half a billion bucks,yes!

Back in the 1960s, an army buddy revealed to me that about half of his meager pay never showed up in his pay envelope. Instead, it went for child support, back in his Rhode Island home town.

“Oh, you’re a father?” I asked, a little bit surprised. He was only about 19.

“No,” he said. He wasn't anybody's father.

“Then how come you’re paying child support?”

What a story! Turns out, a high school friend of his had been hauled off to court for child support after knocking up a classmate.

The friend didn’t want to pay. So he developed a legal strategy that had to do with demonstrating the girl was such a tramp that anybody could have been the father.

The accused father brought in five of his close pals, each of whom testified (falsely) under oath that they had also slept with the unfortunate girl, nine months or so in advance of the childbirth.

This was back in the days before DNA. It was anybody’s word against anybody else’s word. Blood tests could be use to exclude fathership. But nobody had demanded to be excluded.

“Very well,” said the judge, a woman who evidently knew a rat when she smelled one, “Since there’s no way of knowing which of you fathered the child, each of you is ordered pay one sixth of the child's support until the child is 18.”

Which brings us to the unfortunate infant daughter of the late Anna Nicole Smith, who has three men each swearing they are her father.

Don’t we all smell a rat, when the child is the potential heir of nearly $500 million bucks that presumably her closest blood relative would manage? One self-nominating father (the husband of 90 year old Zsa Zsa Gabor) sounds to me like a highly unlikely candidate. The other two – who knows? But the fact that one of them, Howard K. Stern, is thusfar refusing to turn over DNA samples tends to fill the room with the distinctive scent of rodent.

So here’s what I’d suggest that the court do: Hold the child’s money in escrow until she is at least 21, when all of it plus accrued interest can be turned over directly to her. Meanwhile, hit up each of the men who insist they are the father for child support – from private school and college tuition to prom dresses, healthcare and nice, well-maintained living quarters – until she reaches her majority. About 50 grand a year apiece ought to do it.

Meanwhile, let the maternal grandmother raise the child.

Yo, you guys still want to insist you’re the sperm donor?

P.S. After this post went up, I came across news that yet another would-be father has thrown his, uh, sperm into the ring, proof that when you jump into sleeze you can't hit bottom no matter how far down y ou go.

This time it's Anna's bodyguard, evidently claiming that when the lawyer, the ex-boyfriend, and the much younger husband of Zsa Zsa Gabor weren't in bed with Anna, he was. Poor girl! No wonder she was able to lose so much weight. Forget the diet she was on. She had no time to eat.

Judge – hit that man for child support, too!

This is all too disgusting. I'm taking a few days in Florida to get out of the cold and the sleaze. I'll be back with a new post some time around Feb. 21. 'Till then, keep warm. And dry.

Speaking of which, one more thought? Didn't ANY of these guys ever hear of safe sex?