Watching the July 5 episode of General Hospital, we had to rewind and replay the scene in which Sonny was arguing with Dante about the risk of losing Avery forever by going after her mother. In particular, it caught our attention and made our eyebrows shoot up when the career criminal declared, “I’m not the bad guy! I don’t hurt kids! I’ve never hurt a kid!”

Come again? Maybe we’re to think that Sonny is so out of it that he isn’t aware what he’s saying is a load of [bleep] because his Rx has been altered without his knowledge. But given the way the show loves to accessorize his suits with halos, we doubt it. He was just doing something that Scotty and Cates never would and forgetting the events of the fall of 1992. 

Longtime viewers will recall that back then, Sonny was a JV mobster running a strip club called the Paradise Lounge. Part of his job apparently involved talent recruitment. Or maybe he just liked doing it. Either way, the evening high-school honor student Karen Wexler happened into the bar, he began trying to convince her to take it all off on stage. And when she did, he rechristened Scotty’s daughter “Carrie the Schoolgirl.”

It gets worse. Never mind that Sonny had an underage girl enticing his clientele, the boss man gave her drugs. And had sex with her. All of which, in everyone’s book except maybe the one from which General Hospital is reading, amounts to “hurting a kid.”

But it’s a pretty hilarious hill for Sonny to choose to die on, metaphorically speaking. Never hurt a kid, huh? And now he’s going to, in his words, “start acting like what everyone thinks I am.” Mmkay. Ava’s no saint, for sure. She’s got as much blood on her hands as she does nail polish. But Sonny, ol’ pal, what everyone thinks you are… is what you are. You’ve cued up more “hits” than a Top 40 DJ. You’ve shot an undercover police detective in cold blood. (That he turned out to be your son does not make this in any way better.) Your list of offenses goes on and on and on.

Yeah, maybe Ava’s does, too. But it’s the height of hypocrisy and self-unawareness for Sonny to sit in judgment of Avery’s mother or anyone else. Dude’s been getting away with murder for years. And given the skewed morality of General Hospital, a show that made a romantic hero of serial killer Franco, canonized hitman Jason and is currently trying to get homicidal Heather off the “hook,” that makes a strange kind of sense. But if the powers that be are planning to make Ava pay, Sonny had better get his butt in line in front of her.

If she’s deserving of punishment, he’s 100 times guiltier.