Columns don't really work well with scrolling, unfortunately. You can do multiple pages of multiple columns or one scrollable column for longer content - personally, I prefer the latter (and it's simpler technically), but either works.
This would allow more content to be displayed for users with larger screens without overly penalizing users who could only view one column at a time.
The challenge would be to convert the normal vertical scroll to a horizontal scroll in an intuitive way (ie not too jarring for the user).
But you can get display size, and paginate with ~80 character columns. So there's no need to scroll. As you say, scrolling really only works with one column. When I need to read lots of stuff that's hard-coded with two columns, I rotate my monitor to portrait.