Last week, we put up a video of "NBA Live 08" cover athlete Gilbert Arenas talking about playing "Halo 3."

He seemed concerned about getting his rank up on both "Halo 2" and "Halo 3" and said, "I'm pretty good, I'm pretty talented. I was actually beating the pros."

But after a close look at Arenas' "Halo 3" stats, Bungie forum members (and a few commenters here) noticed something fishy. If you look at his games, you'll see that he plays a bunch of Social Doubles where the other team quits out, leaving him in first place. To boot, the length of most of his matches is less than five seconds. Though we're not certain he's cheating, it does look suspicious.

The Washington Post confronted Arenas and got a confession, though the NBA star doesn't think he's doing anything wrong:

"It's a glitch," he explained. "It's a glitch in the game. I seen some kids that were like 600s, they won 600 Halo games and we only had that game for two weeks. And all the kids go to school. So I'm like, 'What the hell you all doing?' And they said that's what they doing, two-on-two." ... "That has nothing to do with me playing against other people, because when I play against other people I'm a 47 out of 50," he argued. "It has nothing to do with your [skill]. That's just like me playing basketball and I say, 'The first one to 100,000 shots...' and I go in there and say 'Yeah, I made 100,000, I won.' But when you go out there you can't shoot the ball."

And what does Bungie have to say about all this? Kotaku got a statement straight from the "Halo" makers themselves:

"As Gilbert Arenas himself admitted, his EXP is suspect. What isn't suspect, however, is his skill level, a far better gauge of a player's ability than the grinding of EXP. He is a level 42, which is pretty exceptional, especially considering all of the time he's likely putting into grinding."

Although what Arenas is doing isn't exactly ethical, does it matter? What do you think?