However, Williams' admission prompted colleagues and rivals alike to do retrospective due diligence on his reportage. When you put a self-promoter under the microscope - and you don't get to be a big dog on US primetime without relentless self-promotion - the odds are you're going to find a few instances of him or her gilding the lily.
It turned out he'd claimed to have been at the Brandenburg Gate the night the Berlin Wall came down when he actually arrived in the city the following day.
While covering the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, for which he earned numerous accolades and awards and propelled himself into the big league, he reported stuff - a man committing suicide in the New Orleans Superdome, a body floating past the Ritz-Carlton hotel - that no one else saw.
Williams has been suspended without pay for six months, which will leave him more than $6.5 million out of pocket. His expenses claims, always a potential can of worms for a globe-trotting newshound, are being investigated. Things could get worse before they get better.
One takeaway from this affair is that Americans have higher expectations of those who read the news than those who run the country - or aspire to it.
Bill Clinton became President despite insisting he'd "tried marijuana but didn't inhale" and stayed President despite insisting he "did not have sexual relations with that woman, Ms Lewinski".
Wife Hillary, unbackable favourite for the Democratic Party's 2016 presidential nomination, had a Williams moment during the 2008 campaign, claiming she'd come under sniper fire during a flying visit to Bosnia in the 1990s. TV footage showed her being greeted by a smiling 8-year-old, as opposed to a hail of bullets, when she stepped off the plane.
As was the case with Williams, her explanation - sleep deprivation - compounded the deceit since it wasn't the first time she'd related the tall tale.
It's been said of the Clintons that they'll always choose to tell a big lie when a small lie would suffice and a small lie when the truth would suffice. It doesn't seem to have done them any harm.
Why do we expect better from those whose most pertinent job requirements are to be telegenic and to read a teleprompter without appearing to?
Blame it on Walter Cronkite who anchored the CBS Evening News from 1962 to 1981 and was voted "Most trusted man in America" in an opinion poll. Naturally CBS trotted out this factoid at every opportunity and it became the mandatory tagline to every media mention of Cronkite. Here, Judy Bailey morphed from newsreader into mother of the nation.
The news is, among other things, a commercial product. On TV it's also a sub-genre of entertainment and a gateway through which the viewer comes aboard the network, hopefully for the evening. Since content is pretty much the same on all the networks, their newsreaders are their unique selling proposition.
Thus people who read the news become personalities: they ad lib, they crack jokes, they emote. Like showbiz celebrities - Williams was a frequent guest on the late-night talk shows - they acquire a persona, a semi-fictional public version of themselves.
And as everyone in showbusiness knows, personas have to be "curated". Which covers a multitude of sins.
