I think you are getting mixed up, and the question itself is misleading as telnet and ssh are two very different things from the tcp/ip viewpoint - SSH uses the defined internet standard port no of 22 (depending on the installation, this may be bumped up to another port by configuration to prevent hackers getting in, generally 2222 is used but it varies!) Telnet on the other hand uses port 23. See here for the clarification of the ports used... In short I am not 100% sure if you can do this but it's worth a shot as I have not tried it...Look here for more details on how to tunnel the POP3 protocol across ssh.
When you connect to port 9999 on the localhost, i.e. 127.0.0.1, you are thereby tunnelling the pop3 server across ssh. As in the example on the securityfocus site, can you forward the telnet port port over to some other port as an example, in your case I think:
ssh -L 9999:telnet:23 somehost
so when you telnet to 9999 you are effectively tunnelled through the SSH.
As a matter of interest what system is running the SSH service? Is it Linux/Unix? The parameter switches to use is -L for local forwarding, likewise for remote forwarding it is -R, the rest of the command parameters remains the same. The essential keyword here is port forwarding.
Hop this helps giving you a hint or two,
Best regards,
Tom.