Monomial ideals via square-free monomial ideals

We study monomial ideals using the operation polarization to first turn them into square-free monomial ideals. We focus on monomial ideals whose polarization produce simplicial trees, and show that many of the properties of simplicial trees hold for such ideals.This includes Cohen-Macaulayness of the Rees ring, and being sequentially Cohen-Macaulay. The appendix is an independent study of primary decomposition in a sequentially Cohen-Macaulay module. We demonstrate how every submodule appearing in the filtration of a sequentially Cohen-Macaulay module can be described in terms of the primary decomposition of the 0-submodule.