Washington ? I will not be having Al and Tipper Gore for dinner. They’ve been carved up enough.

Since they began their combination book-promotion and political coming-out tour to pitch their new book on families, “Joined at the Heart,” the couple America once knew as high school sweethearts who remained starry-eyed enough to share that jaw-dropping convention kiss has been cut to the bone. Conservative commentators have pronounced the Gores to be a model couple no more.

Never mind that they’ve been married 32 years, raised four apparently well-adjusted kids to adulthood and now dote on two grandkids, too. Forget Tipper’s ahead-of-the-curve crusade against raunchy rock lyrics, or Al’s development of a college class on family-centered community building. The Gores stand charged with the all-purpose offense of writing a left-wing manifesto. They embrace, supposedly, a free-to-be-you-and-me definition of family that would be unrecognizable to most of us gathering at grandma’s this weekend.

Morton Kondracke, the Fox News commentator, went so far as to say that although he had not read the book, he understands that the Gores, “who used to be upholders of solid family values, are basically saying anything goes as far as the family is concerned.”

I, too, would be alarmed if I hadn’t read the book. But I have. It’s not Marx, but it’s no more useful.

It contains too many sappy lines, and too many phrases crafted to raise conservative bile. “There are all kinds of families ” and no one has the right to tell you that your family isn’t the right kind,” the Gores declare.

In fact, they also state unequivocally that they don’t support easy divorce, believe kids are “better off in a two-parent family,” and think Americans must abandon the idea that “the primary purpose of marriage is personal fulfillment.”

Could William Bennett, the virtue king, have said it better? No, the trouble with the Gores isn’t that they go too far. They don’t go far enough.

The essence of their book is known to anyone who has perused a Census Bureau report on 40-odd years of changing demographics or, for that matter, stayed up late chatting with an old high school chum.

The Gores tackle every stress and strain that crosses the threshold of today’s homesteads, from misplaced consumerism among the suburban middle class to miscommunication between couples. High housing costs, homelessness, the extraordinary health care crisis facing the “sandwich generation” all get their mention. And not much else.

That is the real problem. The Gores have placed at the table Washington’s most unwelcome guest ” an American family that isn’t just “changing,” but long-ago changed. People get divorced. Grandparents aren’t nearby when they endure life’s decline. Women work. Husbands and wives pass each other in the driveway as one returns from working the dayshift, the other leaves to work nights.

The conservative response to all this is to say public policy should turn the clock back ” back to stay-at-home motherhood for the white middle class, but more and more working hours for the poor. Back to sexual abstinence for the unmarried, even if few people get hitched now before age 25.

The liberal response, enunciated by the Gores, is simply to say the changes can’t be undone and must be accepted. And that’s about it. It’s better than a reactionary bid to travel back in time. But it cannot be mistaken for a constructive idea for the future. It is more a rewrite of Hillary Rodham Clinton’s “It Takes a Village” ” eight years late.

Marie Cocco is a columnist for Newsday.