I agree with you and marto. Most likely (imho), tye approved his own post by using divine powers to do it through paco's account.

I did some digging using my own godly powers, and have assembled the following timeline:

• 1999-10-26: paco created his account, and posted his sole writeup.
• 2000-05-25: he uploaded a package from Everything Development. See Hint Information. (It was never used here.)
• 2000-08-28: he seems to have made an appearance.
• 2002-06-11: seems to have approved and frontpaged that post by tye
• 2002-06-11: levelchange - directly from 1 to 5! which is not normally possible.
• 2002-07-02: homenode.lastedit
• 2004-01-23: homenode.lastupdate
• 2004-06-02: scratchpad created
• 2005-08-15: homenode.nodeupdated

I suspect that tye was being more ironic than nefarious, given that his post was specifically about this:

the ability to approve or front-page your own nodes has been taken away

He had taken away the ability to FP his own node, so wore paco as a sock-puppet to do that deed; and had to jack up paco's level in order to do so easily. :-)