The following editorial appeared Sunday in the Sacramento Bee.

You know it’s a bad time for professional sports when NASCAR looks like a model of rectitude and probity.

In NASCAR, while cheating is commonplace, it also is dealt with openly. And nobody gets shot or indicted. Compare that to the situation in other professional sports at the end of last week.

In Major League Baseball, Barry Bonds was inching toward two inevitables: a place in the record books as the greatest home run hitter of all time and a steroids-induced asterisk, in the minds of fans if not on the printed page.

In the National Basketball Association, Commissioner David Stern looked like a stricken man as he tried to cope with the news that a league referee was under investigation for betting on games he had officiated.

The world of professional cycling was knocked off its orbit by the latest in a string of doping scandals. This one was a doozy. First, two riders were disqualified after positive drug tests. Then, last Thursday, the race’s leader, Michael Rasmussen, was disqualified after his team booted him amid wide suspicion of doping.

Things were so bad that French newspapers were calling an end to the race and the Tour’s director referred to Rasmussen’s withdrawal as “the best news of the week.”

And then there was the National Football League, where star quarterback Michael Vick of the Atlanta Falcons was arraigned on federal charges of conspiring to run a dogfighting ring from property he owns in Virginia.

That came on the heels of the indictment of Adam “Pacman” Jones, a cornerback for the Tennessee Titans, on felony charges stemming from a fight in which three people were shot during the NBA’s All-Star Game weekend last February in Las Vegas.

Surveying this mess, it is hard to recall the days when it was widely thought that sports builds character. That proposition now seems ludicrous, but it is still true that many young people regard sports stars as fashion trend-setters and icons to be emulated.

There’s no indication that the current spate of bad news about sports will change that.

What is clear is that all the bad news may well shift the economic and political ground beneath the business of sports. Professional sports, particularly on the highest levels, depend not just on the revenue from ticket sales and TV contracts but on a base of civic and political support.

If that support erodes – if communities decide they have better things to do with their money than build arenas and stadiums; if business leaders decide that luxury boxes just aren’t that attractive anymore; if political leaders conclude that being photographed with sports celebrities is a liability, not an asset – the business of big-time sports will be in big-time trouble.