by Moe Zilla

Created on: October 24, 2009   Last Updated: November 23, 2010

Here's what's legendary about the great Texas Cheerleader Scandal of 2007. It's not just that you have teen-aged high school girls behaving very badly. ("Boozing, bikinis and bullying," wrote Newsweek.) It's that you also had parents behaving badly. ("Cheerleading mess a team effort", wrote The Dallas Morning News.) It turned into a lesson in a morality lesson in more ways than one.

Because one of the five cheerleaders was the principal's daughter...

What did they do that was so horrible? In December of 2006, a Dallas attorney was hired to investigate. After conducting 75 interviews - with coaches, parents, students, and school administrators - he compiled a report which was shared with the Dallas Morning News. Five cheerleaders became so popular that they dominated the cheer leading squad. But soon "the Fab Five" was also dominating their classrooms. And soon, the newspaper reports, they'd even taken control of the adult authority figures around them.

"They walked out of classes. They wore low-cut tops banned by the dress code. They posed for salacious pictures and posted them on MySpace. And the adults in their lives - from parents to teachers to administrators - did little to stop them."

In one notorious incident, a cheerleader pulled out her cellphone during class, and began having a phone conversation. When the teacher told her to stop, she replied: "Shut up! I'm talking to my mom."

The cheerleaders would even skip school or get caught drinking alcohol - and in one notorious incident, a cheerleader even made an obscene gesture at the adult who was sponsoring the cheerleading program. When the sponsor attempted to respond with discipline, she received push-back from the cheerleader's mom - who was also the school's principal. "I was called a liar, crazy, on meds," she remembers in the investigator's report. Her conclusion? The school principal "tried to ruin my life over this."

For all the naughtiness of the cheerleaders, McKinney, Texas had apparently spawned something even more misguided: five cheerleader moms who allowed it to happen. There were more nasty pranks waiting for the cheerleaders' next sponsor. Her cellphone was stolen by the cheerleaders, who then sent dirty text messages to her husband - and to another coach. The cheerleaders claimed they'd been instructed that "Sex sells" by their sponsor as they prepped for a pep rally.

Investigator Harry Jones complained that the parents were apparently so proud of their popular teen-aged daughters, that they

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