Hey guys, I posted this on another board and the verdict I got was to
fire him. Since I've been lurking here for a while I thought I'd post
it here for some more advice.

A couple years ago I hired a guy named Thomas as a senior tech for a
small data center I run in California. He always seemed like a pretty
competent worker. Thomas had great personal skills, came into work
on-time, and pretty much completed projects better than any of the
other techs in our facility. He seemed like a pretty intelligent guy,
actually. On occasion I've even had dinner with his wife and young
daughter who's going through chemo. I generally consider Thomas a
friend.

The other day I invited him to my house to hang out and have a few
drinks. At one point in the evening we were shooting the sh.t and
talking about the worst things we've ever done in our lives. I
regaled him with a tale about how I stole expensive clothes from
department stores as a teenager and he told me about how he once sent
explicit pictures of his cheating ex-girlfriend sodomizing a toothbrush
to her parents. I laughed and passed him another drink.

I guess he was getting a little too tipsy because a little later he
related a story about how he got his college degree in philosophy. We
don't require college degrees, but we generally hire and give greater
pay to candidates with the degree over the candidate without one.
Thomas said that he bought it off the internet for $450 from some
website called "The Transnational Council" for something something. He
wrote the domain http://www.tcge.org on a napkin and said that he had
listed the degree he got through them on the resume he sent my
secretary two years ago. I've heard this website discussed on some
other message boards before. Apparently they represent universities who
grant degrees based on previous college credits, work history, and
military/life experience. Now I don't know what to do. Company policy
is to terminate people who lie on their resumes, but he doesn't seem
like that bad of a guy. The website he got his degree from looks like
what they're doing is pretty unethical since there's no coursework
involved. But I guess the degree is technically legal. Should I fire
him because he bought his degree from the internet instead of attending
a regular university?

What he did was pretty crooked. I think I'll decide to go ahead and
fire him over this. If you were his employer what would you do?