THE saga of Balloon Boy had it all: a horrific parent nightmare turned feel good story turned fraud saga.

It became obvious to everyone except CNN’s Wolf Blitzer the whole thing was a hoax and just a desperate cry for attention by a fame-obsessed father who eagerly pimped his kids for 15 seconds of TV face time.

Now Richard Heene faces jail time as the same media he courted sifts through his life with a lice comb until enough dirt surfaces to have child protective services remove his children while the cops haul Balloon Dad to jail. My guess is the prison edition of “Wife Swap” will prove to be more reality show than Heene ever bargained for.

But Richard Heene isn’t the only dreamer whose balloon has burst. In Los Angeles, our own shiny flying gasbag has deflated and crashed to earth. The long media love affair with Antonio “Balloon Mayor” Villaraigosa has deflated, and lonely Tony now finds himself untethered, adrift in a sea of broken pipes and red ink. Even mayoral appendage Police Chief Bill Bratton has chosen to grab the first blimp out of town, but not before pulling the pin in one more rhetorical hand grenade.

“L.A. is a city that almost doesn’t work,” the chief told KPCC Radio’s Frank Stoltze.

Phsssssst! There goes more gas out of the mayor’s balloon.

Villaraigosa’s media machine may be the world’s greatest global warming threat when you consider how much hot air has been generated over the past five years: press

eleases by the score, photo-ops on top of photo-ops, quick trips to Washington for this, a dash to New York for that, an international gathering followed by a box seat at a Dodger game. L.A.’s mayor has been everywhere and sadly, he now finds himself nowhere.

The man who craved the media as no other L.A. mayor ever has is left holding a string long after the balloon of his ambition floated away. He’s running a $400 million deficit that increases by a million bucks a day and his greatest political asset has announced to the world the city doesn’t work. Well? Whose fault is that? Who runs Los Angeles, Chief Bratton?

Clearly, it’s not Villaraigosa. The Balloon Mayor was just that – a shiny gasbag whose string is pulled by the real powerbrokers: Brian D’Arcy and the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers, Maria Elena Durazo and the L.A. County Federation of Labor, Phil Anschutz and the AEG Corp., the billboard companies and, until recently, United Teachers Los Angeles and every other public employee union. The mayor had the suit and the smile but it was all tinsel, a Mylar envelope kept aloft by hot air and buckets of your money.

When the pinprick of fiscal irresponsibility finally punctured the mayor’s media bubble, his benefactors let the string go and Tony V’s career came crashing to Earth. The long-running unreality show that has constituted L.A.’s political culture has finally run into the reality of fiscal gravity.

The Balloon Mayor spent more than he had. The Balloon Mayor overpromised and underdelivered. The Balloon Mayor spun when he should have leveled with us. The Balloon Mayor was so busy polishing his image he all but ignored actual public service. With the Balloon Mayor, everything is self-service.

The Balloon Mayor dreamed of flying off to Sacramento. Instead he finds himself stranded in a job he doesn’t want and has yet to demonstrate either an interest in or ability to perform.

Villaraigosa’s gift was self-promotion. In his quest for the next big political office he put Los Angeles at risk. At least Richard Heene only gambled with his own kids’ future. A generation of L.A.’s children will pay for the bungling and backroom deal making of this mayor. I use the past tense when referring to the mayor’s hype machine because the veil has been lifted. A mayor who started on the cover of Newsweek is now “the 11 percent Mayor,” a “failure,” according to Los Angeles Magazine.

He’s become a punch line on Leno and Conan O’Brien, but nobody’s laughing at the unemployment office. Nobody’s laughing as they pack the U-Haul for the move out of L.A. Nobody’s laughing as the gears of city government grind to a halt, gummed up by corruption, cowardice and incompetence.

Balloon Boy was a simple hoax exposed by 6-year-old Falcon Heene himself when he told CNN’s Blitzer “We did it for the show.” Everything the Balloon Mayor has done has also been for show. Now the hoax is out in the open, exposed by none other than Bratton himself.

Up and away! It’s so L.A.!

HOW did we forget to do so many basic things?

How did we forget to pave roads? How did we forget to drill for oil? How did we forget to arrest the bad guys? How did we forget to marry the mother of our children? How did we forget to pay our bills? How did we forget to build cars? How did we forget to educate children?

In the relative short decades of my life, we have booted some of the simplest things men and women do. We have become so wired, so media savvy, so plugged in to celebrity gossip and a trillion shiny distractions, we’ve forgotten how to walk and chew gum.

Running a school is the civic equivalent of walking and chewing gum, but the evidence suggests we’re tripping over our feet and choking on the Hubba Bubba. Los Angeles continues to boot the three R’s. How in the world did the nation that put men on the moon forget how to put textbooks in classrooms?

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DRIVING around the hood I play a guessing game which is, economically speaking, morbid. I call it, “Pin the Tail on the Failing Business.”

A couple of months ago I had money on a bead shop figuring, in a bad economy, beads are one of life’s little luxuries folks will do without. But I seriously underestimated the commitment to beading in the San Fernando Valley.

As it turns out it was the men’s formal wear shop that took the bullet, quickly followed by the bird seed store, the unpainted furniture place and about a dozen others. But that bead shop taught me a lesson – just maybe it’s life’s little pleasures that will get us through these amazingly tense and irritating times.

That would explain the sudden explosion of frozen yogurt shops. I finally cracked and went in for a taste expecting to have the run of the place, Monday night at 9? Ghost town, right?

Wrong. I walked into a wall of human lickers, pre-pubescent KISS wannabees lapping up the Country Vanilla and Pecan Praline swirls, the Mango Tangos, Cheesecakes and ladling cookie crumb and sprinkle toppings onto an extra large Kahlua Supreme.

If the Great Depression of the 1930s made Hollywood, today’s recession is making frozen yogurt a second Sutter’s Mill. Instead of panning for gold we’re licking our blues away. Everybody, let’s sing! “Brother Can You Spare a Scoop?”

Life’s little pleasures are recession-proof because they’re cheap. Even a family trip for frozen yogurt at three bucks an ounce is chump change after the 25 year spending bender we’ve been on. As you may have read recently in this very newspaper, California has lost 800 car dealerships in the past 16 months. But we’ve added 15,000 yogurt stands in the San Fernando Valley alone. At least it seems that way.

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