You can't accept punishment and maintain innocence
Stop talking from the rule book, we all know it's shite, and flawed. We all know there's a nice subsection for rule bending and reinterpretation by the FA too.
He was given an "accept this or the punishment will be harsher" scenario, bit of a no win situation really, it was a more or less enforced punishment that we were given little choice to accept. We did it because we had to.