James O’Keefe fancies himself a guerrilla journalist, but the conservative provocateur was stung by his own fake news again recently when he tried to sting the Washington Post with clumsy spy-kid tactics. The Post easily sniffed out a woman who falsely alleged U.S. Senate candidate Roy Moore impregnated her in Alabama when she was a teenager.

But 1,672 miles due west of D.C. at the Colorado Capitol, O’Keefe inadvertently exposed a public accountability problem that has nothing to do with self-anointed journalism.

The New York attorney general is looking into why O’Keefe’s Project Veritas – a word from the Roman mythology that, ironically, means truth – buried the lead when it failed to disclose O’Keefe has a criminal history. O’Keefe tried to sneak into a Louisiana senator’s office building dressed as a telephone repairman in 2010, saying they needed access to the phones. He was sentenced to three years probation, 100 hours of community service and paid a $1,500 fine.

People who are registered to raise money in New York must disclose their criminal history to inform would-be donors about who they’re giving their money to, which only makes sense.

Colorado doesn’t have that kind of sense. Project Veritas is registered with our Secretary of State’s Office, but in our state, we don’t require those who raise money to say much about their past.

Utah and Mississippi, two deep-red states, blocked Project Veritas from raising money there, too, which the charity also did not disclose in New York.

Set aside O’Keefe, his odd concept of journalism, his attack-dog politics and the generous support of rich conservatives. Anyone giving to his charity knows exactly who he is with a simple Google search.

Colorado, however, owes it to other donors to ask those raising money for charity if they have anything to hide. Let’s hope legislators in the next session benefit from the knowledge of a weakness that O’Keefe has delivered to them.

My hunch is it’s too political, especially for a Senate majority that has deep and direct ties to Americans for Prosperity, a group supported by the industrialist Koch brothers, who also are part of a conservative charity that gave O’Keefe $1.7 million last year.

We’ll see how the Senate GOP handles it if a House Democrats send them a bill to better protect donors from hucksters.

O’Keefe has a string of flopped investigations and high-profile embarrassments, far beyond the sting on the Washington Post. But any publicity is good publicity. According to its registration with the Colorado Secretary of State’s Office, Project Veritas collected more than $4.8 million tax-free last year, all for the purposes of stinging Democrats and journalists.

As part of his trade, O’Keefe was sued in June for $1 million, accused of secretly recording private conversations of Democratic operatives, and in October a judge in Michigan granted a restraining order to a teachers union against Project Veritas. Last month we learned that O’Keefe is fighting with his insurance company which is hesitant to pay his legal bills.

Call operatives such as O’Keefe necessary to achieve an end, but don’t call them journalists.

Journalism is about the pursuit of the truth, fairness and public trust. Those of us in the profession fail sometimes, but those are the objectives of journalism. O’Keefe has demonstrated none of those things, unless you count donors’ trust that he will do their dirty work.

Fred Brown is a legend among Colorado statehouse reporters and now teaches at the University of Denver. He literally wrote the book on “Journalism Ethics” for the Society of Professional Journalist.

The concept of paying for vigilante journalism is borne bad, he tells me.

“No reputable, responsible journalist pays for news or offers any other sort of quid pro quo,” he said. “It contaminates any attempt to get at the truth. Either the source or the reporter is going to be tempted to skew the information to do what he or she thinks the other party to the transaction is looking for.”

Former Rocky Mountain News media critic Jason Salzman, who writes Colorado’s left-leaning The Big Media Blog, went a little easier on O’Keefe’s methods, but not the provocateur’s deceit.

“There’s nothing wrong with gotcha journalism when needed, or with going undercover with a camera to get a story,” he told me.

“But O’Keefe breaks a basic and beautiful tenant of journalism, which is, you don’t bait people or entrap them into doing bad things or doing wrong. You bear witness, do research, hold people accountable. You tell the story not create it. The other big problem with O’Keefe is, he’s lost his credibility by not telling the truth, by editing his stories and videos so they portray fiction instead of reality. An advocacy journalist can have a point of view. But O’Keefe is a propagandist.”

My personal friend Jeff Roberts, executive director of the Colorado Freedom of Information Coalition, is the mile high Diogenes. O’Keefe’s hidden cameras don’t illuminate honesty or integrity, he thinks.

“Someone who engages in deceit for a living isn’t practicing journalism,” Jeff told me. “The job of a professional journalist is to seek the truth, not to purposely distort it. Real journalists don’t attempt to plant fake news stories in order to advance their point of view.”

Editor’s note: This column was corrected to say O’Keefe and his team were arrested attempting to tamper with the phones. They didn’t actually succeed. A Project Veritas spokesman denies that there was an attempt to tamper by the men dressed as telephone repairmen who asked for access to the phones, according to the incident report.