The story of Megan Meier, the 13-year-old Missouri girl who committed suicide after being spurned by the person she thought was her online boyfriend, just keeps getting stranger and more infuriating by the moment.

Megan had transferred schools earlier this year after being excluded from the “popular crowd” because she was overweight. In the process, she decided she no longer wanted to maintain some of her old friendships. But at her new school she blossomed, dropping 20 pounds and joining the volleyball team. She even met her first-ever boyfriend, “Josh”, through her MySpace page.

Only problem? Josh was actually 47-year-old Lori Drew, the mother of one of those friends Megan had stop hanging out with, and she was determined to “mess with Megan”. That’s what she told a neighbor, at any rate. What she told the police is that she wanted to gain Megan’s trust so she could find out what Megan was saying online about her own daughter.

So Drew, pretending to be Josh, flirted with Megan for a full month. Then, just as Megan began thinking of herself and Josh as a couple, Drew-as-Josh typed: “I don’t like the way you treat your friends, and I don’t know if I want to be friends with you.” A day later came the fatal message: “The world would be a better place without you.”

Later, Megan told her mother that hateful MySpace messages about her were being posted. Some called her a slut. Some called her fat.

Megan hung herself in her closet. Her mother found the girl and cut her down from the belt she’d wrapped around her own neck. Megan died the next day still believing that her first boyfriend had wholly rejected her.

Megan had been on antidepressants, a fact of which Lori Drew was aware since Megan had previously accompanied the Drews on family vacations. She’d also been diagnosed with ADD and had been under the care of a counselor. But those sensitivities were, apparently, not nearly as important to Lori Drew as teaching Megan a lesson that proved to be fatal.

All of this, because middle-aged Lori Drew couldn’t accept what normal adults figured out long ago: friendships end, and the best way to help our kids when they’ve been dumped by a friend is by helping them learn to make new ones. Megan Meiers mother didn’t get a chance to do that because Lori Drew abdicated her parental role and took matters into her own hands, posing as another child so she could — let’s face it — get petty revenge on the girl who’d hurt her little girl’s feelings.

Meanwhile, there’s nothing the law can do about it. As the St. Charles’ County Sheriff’s Department spokesperson says of Drew’s behavior, “It might’ve been rude, it might’ve been immature, but it wasn’t illegal.”

Ironically, Lori Drew filed a report with the Sheriff’s department against Megan’s parents for damaging a foosball table belonging to the Drews. It seems Megan’s family had agreed to store the table in their garage at Lori’s request. Six weeks after Megan’s death, when they learned that Lori Drew was behind the hoax that led to her suicide, they took a sledgehammer and ax to it and dumped the pieces on the Drew’s driveway.

Yes, you read that right: Lori Drew all but caused Megan Meiers’ suicide, then wanted to press charges against Megan’s family for taking their grief out on a foosball table.

You know, that woman ought to be damned glad she’s not my neighbor. I’d have skipped the table and gone straight after her with the sledgehammer and ax.