Tom, your defense of your fraud reeks of more shit than the original crime.
If this were a true publication, and if you were a staff writer for any reputable magazine or journal, you'd have been fired on the spot once the fraud had been detected. But tet fact this won't happen simply further soils the Web site and reveals it to be more of your standard Web-based "anything goes" site than it had enjoyed a reputation of being. You and Ran have expended a lot of journalistic capital in the process. Your deliberate misrepresentation and your commitment to not undoing the lie have undermined the credibility of the site and rendered you into a fraud. Too bad, given all the hard work you have done. But then when one has a literary or journalistic reputation, it can go away pretty quickly, which is why we fact check and try to avoid errors and try to correct them when any (inadvertent) mistakes are made.
What I find equally amazing to the original fraud is that in the face of this revelation you persist in your cleverness, your research skills, your imagination and hard work. All of which tells me that creating a lie and sustaining it requires intelligence and guile that ought to be more readily applied to truthful, honest work. I suppose you'll also want to get credit for fessing up to the fraud. But in fact, every word uttered following your admission sounds to me like a further justification. Like I said, any reputable publication would have fired you for this, and your colleagues would have not only disowned you but also retroactively dismissed your other work as fraudulent, too. I completely agree with Tony Pioppi on this.
You're now the Rosie Ruiz of GCA. Or, to fit a more contemporary generation, its Jayson Blair. And he, too, was very smart. He's also out of journalism.