I remember my first Mortenson moment. It was a few years ago, in an old auditorium. Greg Mortenson, arriving late, flashed a shy smile and a namaste (双手合十) sign as he took the stage. Soon he launched into The Story: How in 1993, he stumbled into the tiny Pakistani village of Korphe. How the kind villagers nursed him back to health with many cups of teas. How as payment for their generosity, he returned to build a school. How that one school became hundreds of schools across Pakistan and Afghanistan. And how, tonight, we could help him build more.

If Mortenson’s story -distilled from his mega-bestseller Three Cups of Tea—seemed swarmy in places, its pull was irresistible. Anybody with a heart had to be inspired by the beautiful idea that one man could make such a profound difference in such a hard and desperate part of the world. People had not merely come to listen, they’d come to believe.

This past week, thanks to an extended piece of electronic journalism by bestselling author Jon Krakauer, we learned that Mortenson may very well be a charlatan (江湖骗子). That significant passage of The Story appears to be fictions. That his charity is apparently hopelessly mismanaged. That many of its schools’ sand empty—some of them serving as storage sheds for hay.

It’s only natural to feel betrayed and disappointed upon discovering that those we admire were flawed. But this was more than simple imperfection. Believers like me were left to pick up the million little pieces of yet another shattered hero. And to wonder, how could we have been so gullible?

Americans have a profound longing for heroes—now perhaps more than ever. On some level, we still subscribe to the myth of the man in the white hat. We yearn to believe not only in his good deeds but in his inherent goodness as a person. We seem to have a monochromatic view of heroism. We have a hard time believing that the doer of a heroic deed could have serious defects or even be rotten to the core. Heroes are supposed to be heroic. We prefer to take ours neat.

Yet all heroes and saints are imperfect—even the greatest ones. So what? Their accomplishments seem all the more heroic for their having been complicated, multidimensional, flesh-and-blood human beings.

Our deep need for heroes is tied to the sheer size of our country and the myth of the frontier. During the time of the “winning” of the West, the most popular form of literature in America was the “blood and thunder”: mass-produced novels in which swashbuckling characters rescued kidnapped women, shot up the savages, and saved the day. The nation was hungry for a single heroic character who could personify the surge of Manifest Destiny, exalting American accomplishments while simplifying the stickiest aspects of Western conquest. Who cares if it wasn’t true?

Perhaps the most telling quote from Krakauer’s piece speaks to this same theme—the notion that Mortenson’s story was allowed to blossom without check for years because it soothed the national conscience during a messy, intractable war.

Until we hear from Mortenson, I prefer to hold on to the perhaps naive belief that the final truth of these allegations will fall somewhere shy of doing irreparable harm to his great cause. The idea of Three Cups of Tea remains heroic, even if its creator has gone astray.