“Well, I handled it pretty terribly for the first 48 hours,” Wentz said. “I mean, I quit my band and everything. But then what I realized is that it’s not the worst thing on the planet that’s ever gonna happen. [I] apologized to my mom, realized that the best way to not have pictures on the Internet is to never take the pictures at all, and then made fun of it. I mean, I didn’t put those pictures out there myself. It wasn’t some ploy, you know, like ‘Yeah, this’ll be a way I’ll get my band big!’ We made fun of it in the ‘Arms Race’ video. And just get over it.”

Wentz said that, sure, the press is going to be bad for a while, but we’re living in the 24-hour news cycle, which means, soon enough, there’s gonna be another scandal for the media outlets to glom on to. So if you can take the heat — and learn to laugh at yourself a bit — you’ll wind up just fine.

“I got asked about it in interviews for a while after that, and then I guess it didn’t matter,” he continued. “The bigger deal you make of it, and the more you try to prove that it wasn’t you or it was like this or that, the only people who are really going to know the story are, like, you and two other people. So, it’s like, don’t sit out there and make it a big deal. Let it go away.”

“Everybody was going absolutely crazy,” an eyewitness tells Star. “People were even drunkenly playing makeshift Slip ‘n’ Slide with a mat and lubricant. And Pete was in great spirits. He was dancing and singing along to his band’s own songs, grinding up against the dancers.”

At one point he was “dancing on a pool table with the girls,” the partygoer adds.