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The infamous duo Milli Vanilli slunk off the national radar in the summer of 1990 with the stuttering loop of the hook to their hit song “Girl You Know it’s True.”

After winning a Grammy for Best New Artist, the duo was discovered to be a pair of phonies when their voice-over track skipped at the performance.

The Grammy was taken away. The duo’s album was deleted from their record company’s catalog. The nation breathed a collective sigh of relief and assumed it never would happen again.

Now, enter what has been dubbed “Ashlee-gate.”

Girl, you know it’s true – it happened again.

This time, the artist on the chopping block is none other than the precocious Ashlee Simpson. During her Oct. 22 performance on “Saturday Night Live,” Simpson shocked viewers when a recording of her smash-hit “Pieces of Me,” began playing before she opened her mouth. She looked surprised. She did a little”hoedown” dance. Her band played along and smirked. She ran off stage and cried, then later apologized at the show’s closing.

At a time when the nation as a whole is running around like a chicken with its head cut off soaking up the presidential election, Simpson seemed to be the perfect target to take out some aggression on.

But it just doesn’t seem right. Looking at the situation, Simpson’s fiasco is more to be pitied than censured.

What we’ve got here is a glowing example of how fake the recording industry as a whole has become. If you think Britney Spears didn’t have a voice-over track going every time she did virtual gymnastics on stage while belting out her hit songs perfectly in tune, you’re really kidding yourself.

But it seems as through these artists have been pushed to the point where they have to go to extremes like using a voice-over track. As a nation, we’ve come to expect unattainable perfection from our celebrities and public figures. They need to look, sound and behave perfectly.

Simpson could have muddled through her songs with a broken voice, as her reps say she had that night due to a problem with acid reflux. But then what? She’d still be denounced as a fake.

But instead, she was pushed to be perfect by her reps, including her manager father Joe, who appears to have orchestrated the whole Ashlee Simpson phenomenon from the ground up.

Joe got Ashlee the recording contract. Joe brilliantly marketed Ashlee as the polar opposite of his elder, more famous daughter, Jessica.

Watching the reality show Joe masterminded for Ashlee, it was hard for viewers to miss the underlying tone that Ashlee was jumping into the celebrity spotlight kicking and screaming. It was hard not to feel bad as handlers brought her to photo shoots, stylists and red-carpet events. It was even harder to see her record’s direction deviating from what she originally intended. The constant forced smile on her face was painful. It became clear that pushing Ashlee’s image was more important than her music.

The sick part of the whole “Ashlee marketing plan” is that it worked. It worked brilliantly. “Pieces of Me” shot to No. 1 on the Top 40. Hordes of teenagers fell in love with her. Heck, even I turn up the radio when her songs come on. I’ll admit it – I fell under the spell of Joe Simpson’s marketing machine.

But after the SNL fiasco, I’ve come back down to earth. It’s time we start cutting artists some slack in the areas that don’t matter so they can focus on what they should – their art. We shouldn’t care who’s fat or who’s anorexic. We shouldn’t focus on who’s in rehab or who’s out on another bender. We should care about lyrics and being in tune. We should care about knowing that the image and sound we’re presented with are authentic.

Sadly, until audiences lessen their demands, “Ashlee-gate” is only likely to repeat itself.