DETROIT ? The NFL needs to ask itself one fundamentally important question:

Is it more concerned with Joe Horn’s roaming charges than it is with Matt Millen’s running mouth?

The image-conscious NFL will fine Horn $30,000 for making a cell-phone call — or pretending to — after he scored a touchdown Sunday in the New Orleans Saints’ 45-7 victory over the New York Giants. A teammate took the phone from the padding of a goal post at the Superdome, and Horn phoned home. The stunt was boringly premeditated, one more episode in which a wide receiver gratuitously tries to grab the spotlight.

Is the NFL upset that Horn might have used a phone that wasn’t made by one of the league’s corporate sponsors?

But if Horn is fined for disregarding the spirit of the game and sportsmanship with his end-zone exhibition, then how does the league judge Millen’s distasteful transgression?

Millen used a gay epithet to refer to Kansas City receiver Johnnie Morton after the Lions’ 45-17 loss to the Chiefs. He has apologized twice. Morton, a former Lion who apparently still holds a grudge over how Millen treated him in Detroit, initiated the confrontation when he told Millen to kiss his you-know-what. Lions owner William Clay Ford remains mum on an incident that doesn’t reflect well on the organization, and the NFL isn’t talking, either.

The suspicion is that the parties involved are content to wait out the criticism and then sweep everything under the rug. The NFL likes to flex its disciplinary muscle when players don’t pull up their socks properly or deviate one whit from the blanket conformity the league demands. But it has a tendency to throw sensitive issues back to the teams involved.

That’s a hypocritical approach at best, cowardly at worst.

The NFL isn’t only the biggest entertainment entity in the country, it’s one of the strongest power brokers. It composes the tune to which others dance. While other professional leagues dawdled in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks, the NFL stepped forward and canceled its weekend games. Everyone else soon followed suit. The NFL established the blueprint for financial success with its revenue-sharing principles. Other leagues look at the NFL with envy.

But if the NFL turns a deaf ear to the callousness of a team president, is it not telling players that the consequences for poor behavior are greater for them than for their employers? And shouldn’t more be demanded from those in authority?

The players should be outraged if Millen gets a free pass for embarrassing the league by lowering himself to Morton’s pettiness, while every idiotic thing the players do draws condemnation and sanctions.

There’s frontier justice in football, just as there is in hockey. If any of the Giants didn’t like to be shown up by Horn, they should have done a better job of keeping him out of the end zone or delivered a not-so-subtle forearm to his head when the officials weren’t watching.

The NFL has programmed itself into a vanilla product, devoid of any personality. It wants the national discussion to focus solely on the playoff races in the season’s final two weeks. It demands a certain code of conduct. That’s fine. Horn violated that spirit and will face the consequences.

But Millen went so far out of bounds that the league loses credibility if his insults are swept under the rug until public opinion ventures elsewhere.