As it turns out, spam isn't the most poisonous thing getting into my inbox lately.

Our neighborhood, like many urban neighborhoods in America, has a Crime Watch program, as well as a special Security program which pays off-duty cops to patrol our streets on their off-hours. And when something does happen, the news is quickly circulated via email to alert the neighbors.

So far, so good. But the other day, I got an email from a neighbor reporting that she had seen an "elderly man" cruising slowly through the neighborhood with a dog ("some sort of terrier") in his car. She has seen him on several occasions in both residential areas and near public parks. She wasn't sure what he was doing, but she never saw him out walking the dog. "What if he's a predator after my children?," she wondered.

The next day, a reply email from another neighbor replied that she had seen this man too, and concerned about what she had read in the previous day's email, she followed his car to his home (also located in our neighborhood) and then looked up his address on a Sex-Crime Registry website. He wasn't registered, but she also called the police and was told he had no prior arrests. "So, it goes to show that you can never be to careful," she wrote, adding, "It creeps me out knowing that my two boys play out in the front yard and this pervert is cruising around watching them."

So, let's see what we've got so far: a man drives around with his dog, doing absolutely nothing wrong and one neighbor imagines that he might be a pedophile. Although the next neighbor determines that he has no prior record, instead of concluding that there's nothing to worry about, she figures that he's found a way to beat the system and is an at-large child molester, and that she needs to warn the others.

A flurry of emails followed with confirmed sightings from one neighborhood to the next of this "monster." People are appalled, disgusted that someone like him is allowed to roam free. Mind you, he's done nothing wrong and he has no criminal convictions for ever doing anything wrong. As far as anyone really knows, he's just an old man in his car with his dog, and based on the tone of some of the emails, I start to fear for his safety.

Finally, his next-door neighbor chimed in. The man, she wrote, has lived here virtually all his life, and is now too ill to walk his dog (he used to have two, but one of them recently died). He still likes to get out, though, so he drives around a while and stops and lets his dog out for a few minutes to run in the park while he waits in the idling car. "He's the most harmless man you'll ever meet," she assured us.

I'm frankly ashamed to be living among such paranoid neighbors. Some over-protective mother sees someone behaving "differently" than she would like, and her first reaction is to think someone wants to sexually molest her children (a sick conclusion that says more about the cockroaches in her mind than about the poor old man). But once the accusation is out there, the neighbors each join in, ignoring all of the evidence to the contrary, following the man around, running background checks on him, gossiping over the Internet what they think he might be up to. Absolutely disgusting.

All of this resonates uncomfortably with tales of the Old South, when innocent black men were lynched because some sexually-repressed white woman thought he was looking at her in a way that "made me feel dirty all over."

What do I care? Well, I'm different, too. I'm in my 50s, single and live alone. I shave my head and don't go to church on Sunday. Someone might conclude that I fit their profile of a pervert, and start following me around and running checks and sending emails to my neighbors about their sexual fantasies of what I might be doing behind closed doors.

Irony: while I was writing this story, the doorbell rang, and two adorable young girls, aged about 8 to 10 I guess, were there selling Girl Scout cookies. I've got them bound and duct-taped in the crawl-space beneath my house now.

JUST KIDDING! I bought $15 worth of Thin Mints from them and waved to their mother, who was waiting discretely at the end of the driveway. At least I'm still trusted enough in this paranoid neighborhood to allow mothers to send their daughters to my door, even if it is with adult supervision.

I should send one box of mints to that poor old man.