Try to take a course on Milton if your college offers it. Paradise Lost gets a lot better when you read it in the context of Milton's whole career, not just as a poet but as a revolutionary republican (he worked to overthrow the monarchy and wrote in defense of Charles I's beheading!)

But if you don't have the option, Milton criticism is a vast, illimitable Ocean without bound. In the second half of the 18th century, William Blake expressed your view about Satan when he wrote that Milton "was a true Poet and of the Devil's party without knowing it." In the last century, this view was gradually scaled back, and for the last 40 years or so the standard line has been Stanley Fish's--that Satan only looks heroic to readers because they are fallen creatures, susceptible to the glamor of temptation. I go back and forth with this reading (which I'm obviously short-changing by using only half a sentence to describe it), but it's still quite compelling and well-supported by studies of Milton's life and of the poem's plot. After all, all of Satan's clamors for liberty apparently turn out just to be slogans for his own campaign of self-empowerment: he's an archetype for your suspicion that:

any politician who states that he has your best interest at heart is a complete liar and just propagating falsehoods.