Varsity Blues, which exposed the illegal college admissions machinations of the super-rich, is the scandal that keeps on giving. Celebrity perp walks! Was that Felicity Huffman sashaying down Northern Avenue? Lori Loughlin rocking pink Birkenstocks! Mighty institutions brought low! Yale’s women’s soccer coach on the take? Say it ain’t so!

I’ve been savoring a just-released book about the scandal, “Unacceptable,” by Wall Street Journal reporters Melissa Korn and Jennifer Levitz. It’s jaunty, it’s readable, and the authors aren’t scared of tabloid argot, e.g., this brief allusion to the scandal’s ringmaster, Rick Singer: “After flipping him like a stack of pancakes, the feds sent Singer off with marching orders.”

To be fair, the Globe’s coverage of this ethical race to the bottom has been delightful. How not to fall in love with Los Angeles businessman Devin Sloane, who used the family pool as a backdrop for his son’s fictional water polo exploits, and exploited “his dead mother as a prop for a fake donation” to the University of Southern California, a.k.a. The Harvard of Where the Harbor Freeway Meets the Santa Monica.

In “Unacceptable,” the authors remind us of Sloane’s “proposal to avoid prison by instead vol­unteering for a community service project that would ‘create a bridge program that basically brings the values of inclusion, anti-bullying, and diversity di­rectly to the independent school children, who are the focus of this case,’” according to his lawyer.

Judge Indira Talwani riposted that “independent school” children were hardly the victims of the admissions scandal, noting that “independent” is a euphemism for private school.

The judiciary acquitted itself well in Varsity Blues, with Talwani and her colleagues Douglas Woodlock and Nathaniel Gorton generally scotching defense lawyers’ hopes that their well-manicured clients wouldn’t go to jail.

There is a lovely scene where Woodlock brushes aside probation for California surfing executive Jeffrey Bizzack, who paid $250,000 to get his son into USC as a bogus volleyball recruit. “It’s a jail case for me,” Woodlock said. “This is a rich person’s crime, that’s what it is.”

Last November, Judge Gorton sentenced title insurance executive Toby MacFarlane to six months in prison, commenting that MacFarlane’s crime “will be no more tolerated than the conduct of a common thief, because that’s what you are, a thief of the respected values of decency and fair play that is a fundamental concept of our way of life.”

In a whiny letter to Chief Judge Patti Saris, numerous defense attorneys accused the government of steering Varsity Blues cases to Gorton, “a clear form of judge shopping.” Saris suggested they direct their concerns to Gorton himself.

To be perfectly Boston about it, I have to ask: Why would you spend hundreds of thousands of dollars, and risk public humiliation and jail time, for a slot at the University of Spoiled Children? Wouldn’t you aim higher, say Dartmouth, or Tufts?

Similar thoughts seemed to be haunting Chief Judge Saris (Radcliffe, Harvard Law), who inquired of a Department of Justice lawyer: “Can I stop you? I don’t know USC very well. That’s a private college, right? It’s not a public one. UCLA is public, of course.”

So thank you, US attorney Andrew Lelling, and thank you occasionally embattled FBI Boston Field Office, for 18 months of four-star edutainment. I doubt I am alone in delighting in other people’s misfortunes, or, in this case, crimes.

Alex Beam’s column appears regularly in the Globe. Follow him on Twitter @imalexbeamyrnot.