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If you’re kicking yourself for already failing your diet or whatever New Year’s resolutions you promised yourself this year, don’t feel bad. In fact, if you want to feel good about yourself, thank your lucky stars that you aren’t currently in jail or facing legal trouble for a stolen credit card. You’ll see what we mean, if you look at our latest in unusual credit card crimes.

Finders weepers

Know anyone who is unemployed and living in Swoyersville, Pennsylvania? I’m guessing that there is now a job opening at PA Landscaping. It’s just a hunch. I could be wrong.

But Tyrone Kovalcin, 35, probably didn’t do his chances of a raise or promotion any favors when he allegedly stole his boss’s credit card and used it to get $30 worth of gas, according to The Citizen’s Voice, the paper of record for Lucerne County in Pennsylvania.

Kovalcin will be explaining everything to a judge Jan. 11, but for now, we’ll file this in the “what was he thinking?” category. Kovalcin told the police that he had left work about 3:30 p.m. on October 6 and noticed a wallet lying behind his the desk of his boss, Paul Angeli.

A dutiful employee would have mentioned to Angeli that he shouldn’t leave his wallet lying around, or at the very least walked on, assuming the boss knew where it was, but Kovalcin admitted he picked it up, saw the credit card and took the wallet. After buying the gas, he went down the street and threw the wallet in a trash can. Surveillance video showed a Ford pickup like his at the gas station.

Kovalcin informed the police that he had stopped taking his meds and, before taking the wallet, had been using heroin. Well, yes, that might explain his thinking.

Nabbed at Dairy Queen

I get tired thinking about it. Emily Stice, 20, had an interesting scheme going on in Naples, Fla., with her credit cards.

Well, they weren’t her credit cards.

She was allegedly using fake credit cards to buy jewelry, according to NBC Channel 2 in Naples. She then took the jewels to a pawn shop, trading them in for cash. She also would use her fraudulent cards at the Dairy Queen she worked at, swiping them at the register and then cancelling the purchase and pocketing the refund.

Very clever, but she was caught doing her credit card and pawn scheme, and after NBC2 did a story about her, the Dairy Queen owners saw it. They started auditing their own books and learned that Stice had been ripping them off as well, which has only added to her legal troubles.

In case anyone wants to take up a collection, Stice is currently in jail on $60,000 bond.

So that’s what the basketball strike was all about

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Maybe the NBA players really did need the money that they were after during the recent strike. They apparently don’t want to someday wind up like former NBA player Ronald Behagen. Well, now, I see everything in a completely different light. I thought it was just greed.

This is another sad story, if nothing else for how far this guy has fallen. One day he’s playing for teams like the Atlanta Hawks and the New York Knicks, and another day, Behagen, who is now 60, is convicted of taking the credit card from a woman with Parkinson’s disease, Alzheimer’s and dementia. Talk about going after someone defenseless.

It’s a familiar tale, unfortunately. As the Associated Press reported, the victim’s caregiver, Valla Rider, the person who should have been protecting this patient, is friends with Behagen and gave him the card.

Behagen then used the card 40 times — yeah, 40 — to take out $7,140 from the woman’s account between April and June 2011.

Kudos to the victim’s ex-husband, apparently looking out for his ex-wife, who noticed the withdrawals on the bank statement. Behagen was given three years’ probation.

He also owes $30,000 in child support

Wayne Saul, Jr., according to The Beatrice Daily Sun, the paper of record for Beatrice, Neb., just got 20 to 48 months in prison for stealing a credit card and using it to take about $2,200 out of an ATM. It’s another kind of sad case. This guy has been arrested 31 times since 1992. His attorneys say that he is a nice guy, but one who is plagued by drug and alcohol problems.

“I think Mr. Saul could be a valid member of society if he just kept his hands off other people’s stuff,” Gage County Chief Deputy Attorney Rick Schreiner told the judge on Jan. 4. “He can’t do that. He has a 20-year history of not being able to do that. I don’t think probation is in order here. He’s had his opportunities.”

The judge, Paul Korslund, agreed, and instead of sending Saul to a work ethic camp as the defense attorney suggested, sent him to prison. Korslund told Saul that “at this point the court’s primary concern is protecting people from your inability to respect the law.”

Sounds like the judge made the right call. The credit card that Saul took? He allegedly stole it from a church.

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