Joe Posnanski finally ended his silence in regards to Joe Paterno and his upcoming book on the now severely tainted coach.

With Paterno coming out Tuesday, Posnanski wrote a first-person piece in USA Today Thursday. Formerly with Sports Illustrated, he now is the senior columnist for the sportsonearth.com, a joint venture between the USA TODAY Sports Media Group and MLB Advanced Media.

Posnanski writes:

Joe Paterno, throughout his life, has been infused with superhuman qualities and inhuman qualities. He was called perfect for so many years, and he was called omniscient and all powerful too. He was none of these things, though. The first words of the book came to me all at once:

“This is the story of a man named Joe Paterno, who in his long life was called moral and immoral, decent and scheming, omniscient and a figurehead, hero and fraud, Saint Joe and the devil. A life, of course, cannot be reduced to a single word, but …”

But … what? That was my book. There was the bloated superhero of Nov. 4, the savage villain of Nov. 5 … and I searched for the human being in the middle. I believe most of us live somewhere in the middle.

Clearly, Posnanski intends to write about the all the “good” Paterno accomplished in his life. He writes:

Nobody would argue — and certainly my book does not argue — that the good Joe Paterno did in his life should shield him from the horrors of his mistakes. Some would argue, especially in the white-hot emotion sparked by the latest revelations, that Paterno’s role in the Jerry Sandusky crimes invalidates whatever good he might have done. My book does not argue that either. My book, I believe, lets the reader make up his or her own mind. When people ask me if Penn State was right in tearing down Joe Paterno’s statue in light of the Freeh Report’s conclusion, I ask a different question: “Should they have built a statue to him in the first place?” When people ask me if the NCAA was right in unleashing draconian penalties against Penn State, I ask a different question: “Should they have held up Joe Paterno as a paragon of purity and virtue for more than four decades?”

And he adds:

As a writer, I tried to take the measure of the man who was that head football coach. I believe I have written about his life with as much honesty as I have. I have reported as many of the facts of the Sandusky case as I could uncover (including some new ones). But I also objectively wrote about why so many people admired and idolized Joe Paterno in the first place. I wrote at length about his youthful idealism. I wrote at length about his unprecedented success as a coach. I wrote at length about the last 15 years of his life when he would not quit. I wrote at length about the end.

I wonder if people will be in the mood to read about the high points in Paterno’s life. It all seems so obscured, even irrelevant, in light of what he did in the Sandusky case.

Posnanski concludes:

No, I don’t feel about Joe Paterno the same way I did when I started writing the book. But I don’t feel about him the way his most blistering critics feel. He was a human being, filled with ideals and flaws, honesty and hypocrisy, charity and selfishness, modesty and the refusal to abdicate his throne. There was little simple about him. I chased the complicated story of a man and his long life. I hope that is the story I wrote.

That passage would suggest that Posnanski, while being objective, might have a more sympathetic tone than many people will be able to stomach.

Again, we’ll all find out more when the book is released on Tuesday.