Huh, with a quick fiddling with the save, I found that you CAN edit the save directly without any particularly special programs or knowledge of the code.
If you open up your save file with notepad++ (Regular text editors ruin the save file due to not properly saving the format), you'll find a bunch of messy lines. What you're looking for is the <creature> entry. If you just want to change your founder's stats, I recommend you start a new game and edit it from there so there'll only be a single creature entry.
To edit attributes, you're looking for an entry like the following:
<attribute><attribute>-842150451</attribute><value>4</value></attribute>
There are eight of these entries, and they are not marked. The only difference seems to be the <value> entry, the <attribute> entry is identical with all 8 attributes so I have no idea how to differentiate it. I suggest you match the info in the game and your save to figure out what's what.
Now, if you simply increase the value (4) into something that takes more than a single space, the save will become invalid. In order to prevent this, you'll need to make sure the code's length is the same before and after the change.
For example, if you wanted to increase the attribute above from 4 to 99, you would do something like this:
<attribute><attribute>-842150451</attribute><value>4</value></attribute>
to
<attribute><attribute>-84215045</attribute><value>99</value></attribute>
And if you wanted to change it to a three digit value:
<attribute><attribute>-8421504</attribute><value>999</value></attribute>
As far as I know, changing the <attribute> entry does not have any side effects.
For changing skills, you'd find this line.
<skill><associated_attribute>3</associated_attribute><skill>1</skill><value>0</value></skill>
I'm assuming the <associated_attribute> entry is exactly what it says on the tin, but I haven't changed it to see if it did anything.
Unlike attributes, the <skill> entry differs between skills. Furthermore, I don't really see anything I can erase to make to make the line remain the same length. So if you have skill 0, the best you can make it is 9. If you have 10 skill, you can raise it to 99, but otherwise you'll need to raise it in-game.
Then again, if you just make your attributes ridiculously high, you'll rapidly gain skill so I don't think it's much of an issue if you're going for an uber-founder.
Some other entries you might find interesting are <age>, <money> (One false entry and one real one, the fake one should be obvious), <juice>, <crimes_suspected> (different entries for different crimes), <itemtypename> (which is used in both character and LCS inventory), and the <armor> and <weapon> entries (Which precede <itemtypename> when used in character inventory).
But really, using a memory editor is much easier.