....here is the risk that Lot takes: he turns his face toward Sodom and willingly exposes his family to the grave moral threats there. And it does indeed affect them. Ultimately, his wife cannot bear to leave, looks back, and is lost. His daughters escape, but later engage in the grave sin of incest. Lot, too, will find it hard to flee Sodom, finding God’s offer to save him to be too much trouble. He’d rather stay, whatever the risk....
....Lot has only one resource in his favor: Abraham is praying for his ne’er-do-well nephew. He asks God’s destroying angel to spare Lot and his family (Gen 19). God agrees to this and acts to save Lot in spite of himself. Really, it’s the only thing that saves Lot.
It is true that Lot was just, in the sense that he did not approve of the sin around him. But neither did he act to really protect himself or his family from it. Something about Sodom appealed to him. Perhaps he thought he could make money there (or perhaps the trains ran on time). Whatever the benefits, Lot weighed them more heavily than the risks....
....So lazy and settled in with sin has Lot become, that he’d rather accept death than expend the effort to flee. Not only that, he can’t even manage to rouse himself in order to save his family. It’s all just too much trouble. Sloth is sorrow, sadness, or aversion. Thanks to Abraham’s prayers, the angels literally drag Lot and his family out of the city and repeat the warning: “Flee!” God who made you without you, will not save you without you. So Lot must cooperate. But still, Lot sees it as all just too much trouble. In effect, he says, “Man, those hills look far away. And they’re not nearly as nice as this valley. It’s going to take a lot of effort to get there. Do I really have to go that far?”
circlecity: Yet Peter referred to Lot as righteous.
Indeed he did:
For if God spared not the angels that sinned, but cast them down to hell, and delivered them into chains of darkness, to be reserved unto judgment;You'd think that Msgr. Charles Pope would listen to the words of his first pope, but instead he proves himself a scripturally illiterate idiot.
And spared not the old world, but saved Noah the eighth person, a preacher of righteousness, bringing in the flood upon the world of the ungodly;
And turning the cities of Sodom and Gomorrha into ashes condemned them with an overthrow, making them an ensample unto those that after should live ungodly;
And delivered just Lot, vexed with the filthy conversation of the wicked:
(For that righteous man dwelling among them, in seeing and hearing, vexed his righteous soul from day to day with their unlawful deeds;)
The Lord knoweth how to deliver the godly out of temptations, and to reserve the unjust unto the day of judgment to be punished...
-- 2 Peter 2:4-9
In contrast with the Sodomites, Lot was certainly righteous. That doesn’t mean he was perfect.
Lot could have been a "righteous" man who was "vexed" about the evils of his neighbors, and still have been too slothful to act effectively. He still had his "tent pitched" there within the moral stench of Sodom, still was reluctant to do what the angel said, still said the hills were too far away, still (arguably) had stayed in the environs so long that he's partly responsible for his wife and daughters being corrupted: his wife because she looked back, his daughters because they later turned to sexual vice themselves.
Lot could be "just" and "vexed" with the evil, and still have this flaw of being too passive and too much of a procrastinator, having to be grabbed by the hands and dragged out of harm's way.
Or do you think that righteous men must be faultless? He did have the fault, I would argue, of offering his daughters to be gang-raped, and of getting so drunk his daughters could exploit him sexually.
So if Lot was a "just" man, he was also one with, shall we say, a certain amount of imperfection.