MAYBE Michael Mitchell has an excuse for this, but I doubt it. Maybe he intended to make those nursing home payments for his uncle, Parren Mitchell, and maybe it just slipped Michael's mind every month for more than three years. And maybe he meant to mention that he'd secretly purchased a car with his uncle's money, and then smashed it up, and used his uncle's money to pay off some bills from his bar. And maybe he just forgot to pay those $25,000 in tax bills for his uncle.

But I doubt it.

At this point in his history, Michael Mitchell appears to have run out of all conceivable excuses. He is the man who might have been anything, and instead has become an embarrassment to all who once believed in him.

He is the son of two civil rights lions whose ghosts surely weep today. Clarence M. Mitchell Jr. and Juanita Jackson Mitchell spent their lives helping to give America a conscience, and never imagined their son would cast his own aside. If Michael Mitchell's life story were written today, it would be called "Dishonor Thy Father and Thy Mother."

And thy uncle, too."

As The Sun's Walter Roche Jr. and Ivan Penn documented two days ago, Michael Mitchell was entrusted with his uncle's finances when Parren Mitchell, now 80, weakened by strokes, entered the Keswick Multi-Care Center in Roland Park more than three years ago. The finances include a $60,000-a-year congressional pension and a trust that holds title to his former West Baltimore home.

But Parren Mitchell's bills have gone unpaid - including more than $100,000 to the nursing home, a nonprofit facility whose officers said the failure to pay has stretched their finances.

Taxes have also gone unpaid - to Parren Mitchell's apparent astonishment. And Michael Mitchell has instead used his uncle's money to pay expenses on a Pigtown bar Michael helps run, and to buy a car Parren Mitchell says he knew nothing about.

He said this to The Sun's Roche and Penn one evening last week - when Penn signed in for them at the front desk and then the two reporters visited his room at Keswick. Already in the room was one of Mitchell's round-the-clock care workers, who stayed during the interview.

It shouldn't be important to point this out - but maybe it is. Michael Mitchell has declined all requests for an interview from this newspaper. But, attempting to head off the story, he launched a preposterous charge about Sun reporters "sneaking" into his uncle's room, exhibiting "lack of respect for a great American."

This is known as a lie. It is also known as a pathetic attempt to distract people from the real story.

In an interview with the Afro-American, Michael Mitchell also said The Sun reporters "attempted to ask questions about various matters that were none of their business."

The questions were related to the very business that Michael Mitchell was supposed to handle for his uncle and, for more than three years, has not.

Instead, he has written one of the sorriest chapters about a family that paid enormous dues in the service of black people and of the American conscience in matters of racial fairness.

Parren Mitchell fought some of the loneliest battles of the 20th-century civil rights struggle.

He is the man who would not be turned away, a half-century ago, from a University of Maryland that had never admitted an African-American as a graduate student. He became the first black congressman in Maryland history, and one of the first in the nation. When his days in Washington were done, he ran for lieutenant governor of Maryland. He retired from public life with an unquestioned reputation for honesty and integrity.

Michael Mitchell is different from his uncle.

Michael is the former city councilman and former state senator who went to federal prison with his brother Clarence for trying to obstruct a congressional investigation. Michael is the one disbarred for stealing $77,417 in insurance money from the 3-year-old son of a murder victim. That was 14 years ago. Convicted in state court, Michael has yet to repay that money.

Now he takes from his own family.

Parren Mitchell deserves better than this. He deserves better than to have his finances mishandled and his reputation endangered. And he deserves better than the unseemly response his nephew has offered when caught in such an embarrassing position.