The GREEN LANTERN villain Sinestro, from his debut in GREEN LANTERN #7 (1961), has always been regarded as the hero's arch-enemy. That said, writer John Broome only provides a sketchy account as to how the red-skinned alien-- whom Green Lantern once calls "my Satanic-faced foe"-- becomes the universe's only renegade Green Lantern. The readers are only told that, through an unknown process, the Guardians of the Universe selected Sinestro to serve as galactic cop to his star-sector, including his birth-planet Korugar. After a period of serving nobly in the Corps, Sinestro fell victim to "the virus of power" and established himself as a despot over his people, after which the Guardians stripped him of his ring and his station, and then exiled him to the anti-matter universe Qward, where evil and destructive impulses are the norm. The Qwardians had already appeared about half a year earlier in GREEN LANTERN #2, but they had no leader as such. Broome presumably decided that a world of evil needed a ruler, and what better ruler than a "rebel angel" cast out by his heavenly bosses?
Sinestro's background remained sketchy for the next thirty-plus years, until Ron Marz and Scott Kolins put forth a "secret origin" in 1999.
The story is structured as a tale being narrated by a Guardian named Ganthet to a cloaked figure who, by the end of the framing device, proves to be Hal Jordan during his brief tenure as the Spectre. No reason iks given as to why Jordan, who was Sinestro's greatest enemy when the former was a Green Lantern, is belatedly hearing this secret origin at this late date.
Prior to this origin-tale, there had been dozens if not hundreds of villains who started out as non-entities who choose to rebel against society by becoming evildoers. Marz, having been a comics-fan, had almost certainly seen many, many origins in which the villain's motivation was resentment, and it's possible that for that reason Marz decided not to follow that bif of cliched psychologizing.
Instead, the future villain-- whose real Korugarian name has, Ganthet says, long been forgotten-- begins as a nonentity who nurtures no obvious resentment of anyone. Sinestro begins as a low-ranking anthropologist on his homeworld, described by Ganthet as a "relatively unremarkable man." His only passion revolves around his project of reconstructing an ancient Korugarian city from its ruined condition, and his passion stems, Ganthet says, from his need for symmetry and order. Marz does not enlarge on how Sinestro reconstructs a whole city by himself, but at the opening of the narration, he's all alone amid the dead dwelling-places-- just as an alien Green Lantern crashes into one of the reconstructed buildings.
Sinestro, showing none of his future remorselessness, strives to help the alien. The creature, knowing that he's being pursued by the enemy who defeated him, passes his ring to Sinestro in what it obviously a mirror-image of Hal Jordan's ascension to ring-bearing status.
Seconds after Sinestro receives the mystic jewelry, the alien's enemy, one of the Weaponers of Qward descends to the site and begins attacking Sinestro. Though the Korugarian has no time to learn how to work the ring, he uses his knowledge of the archaic city, and the Qwardian is "crushed by the clockwork structure of Sinestro's mind" when the neo-Lantern drops a building on the warrior's head.
However, the destruction of the only thing Sinestro cares about pushes him toward the path of ruthlessness. Since he has been harmed by the city's demolition, he turns a deaf ear when the alien Lantern begs for the return of the ring in order to heal his fatal wounds.
The Guardians, unaware of Sinestro's complicity in this death, allow the Korugarian to assume the status of guardian of his star-sector-- after which the rest of Sinestro's career follows its designated course. The only other interesting detail Marz supplies is that when it comes time for the Guardians to punish the renegade, they choose to send Sinestro to Qward "because the irony of it appealed to us." Since there's no such irony as such in the original Broome backstory, Marz presumably means that said irony proceeds from Sinestro's revised history. Since the renegade first distinguished himself by defeating a Qwardian warrior, giving him over to the Qwardians would be not unlike a U.S. cavalry officer surrendering a rebellious Indian scout to a tribe that wants to kill him. But the Guardians' sense of poetic justice trips them up, because Sinestro harnesses the great resources of the anti-matter world against the world of goodness.
The frame-story wraps up with some nattering about correcting old mistakes, but the meat of the story is Marz's idea of giving evil a more mundane origin than Broome's notion of the seductiveness of power. Marz purposely does not give Sinestro any sort of personal life, and a writer more wedded to cliche would have probably harped on the character's inability to make interpersonal connections, as indicated by his passion to resurrect a dead city. Rather, Marz is interested in showing evil arise from "random choice." Sinestro's stated passion for order is presented as if it came about by fiat, rather than from his pedagogical history, and so his decision not to return the power ring to its original owner also comes about from a random choice, the choice to find a new orderliness in the career of a Green Lantern. In accordance with his established history, he distinguishes himself for a time, but since Sinestro has made his choice in response to a new passion, itself coming about from a random encounter, he's easily seduced to the "virus of power."
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