A few weeks before the election, we debunked a fake news story from a site touting itself as the “Denver Guardian.”

The story was just a drop in the ocean of fake news that has since been uncovered and discussed on a national scale since the Nov. 8 election, from the halls of Facebook’s corporate headquarters, to the Airbnb rentals of the men crafting and distributing fake news, to President Obama calling out fake news on an international stage.

But, because we here at The Post are biased against people claiming to be from Denver, the man behind the fake Denver Guardian site still stuck in my craw.

I began a short investigation into the Google ads that were run on the site and discovered, with the help of tipster Tim Elliot, that the same ad code was used on multiple sites, including NationalReport.net. The investigation lost steam as it’s been all hands on deck to cover the election and Donald Trump administration transition in the newsroom.

Related Articles November 5, 2016 There is no such thing as the Denver Guardian, despite that Facebook post you saw

As luck would have it, the team at NPR News was also intrigued by the forces behind Denver Guardian and today posted their findings — as well as a long interview with the fake-news man himself.

Meet Jestin Coler, a registered Democrat, the 40-year-old founder and CEO of Disinfomedia and the creator of DenverGuardian.com (among many other fake sites).

The NPR News story goes deep into his web of fake news, as well as his motivations.

“Really the financial part of it isn’t the only motivator for me. I do enjoy making a mess of the people that share the content that comes out of our site. It’s not just the financial incentive for me. I still enjoy the game I guess,” he said when asked if he was just in it for the money.

Why Denver, though?

“The idea was to make the sites look as legit as possible so the home page is going to be local news and local forecast, local sports, some obituaries and things of that nature, and then the actual fake news stories were going to be buried off the homepage,” he said.

It’s not even the first time that Coler, who lives in a suburb of Los Angeles, has made (real) news in Colorado. One of Coler’s sites was responsible for a fake story about Colorado food stamp recipients using them to buy marijuana in 2014.

When Republican State Sen. Vicki Marble of Fort Collins introduced a bill to prevent such purchases, she was widely derided by liberal blogs at the time for buying into the fake news story, but the timing was actually just a coincidence, as former Denver Post reporter Lynn Bartels wrote at the time.

All of the titans of the digital industry are working to battle the “scourge” of fake news, including Google pulling ads from the sites and renegade teams inside Facebook working to solve the problem on the world’s biggest social network.

But as Coler says, a lot of the problem starts with the reader.

“Some of this has to fall on the readers themselves. The consumers of content have to be better at identifying this stuff,” he said. “We have a whole nation of media-illiterate people. Really, there needs to be something done.”

Read the whole report over at NPR.