So much for that enchanting summer of ’98 when Mark McGwire and Sammy Sosa held us in rapture with their spirited chase of Roger Maris’ home run record.

It quickly became tainted enough with the revelation that McGwire was using muscle-enhancing (but legal) drugs and now it turns out Sosa may very well have been using a corked bat.

Beautiful. What a game, baseball.

Bud Selig’s worst nightmare moved across the AP wires at 7:40 p.m. Tuesday with the news out of Wrigley Field. Sosa, the Cubs’ affable and world-famous slugger, had been ejected when the bat he cracked in the first inning was found to be loaded with cork.

Sosa did not offer his customary two-fingered kiss upon his departure, nor was he immediately available for comment, but what could he possibly say? I didn’t know? Somebody else must have done it? It wasn’t my bat? It was all a joke? As it turned out, it was a variation of the third.

These were all the sort of excuses offered by baseball’s more celebrated doctored-bat miscreants of the past — Albert Belle, Graig Nettles, Norm Cash, to name three — and after all was said and done, their transgressions against the game’s integrity were largely dismissed as isolated incidents, more humorous than deceitful. But then none of them could be considered a baseball icon, worthy of a plaque and a hallowed place in Cooperstown.

Make no mistake about this, however: There is no humor in Sosa being caught using a corked bat, only shame and disgrace. Worse, a huge shadow of distrust has been cast over baseball as Sosa, who April 4 became the 18th player to join the elite 500 club, is now the only one of them known to have used a corked bat.

In other words, unless he can somehow prove otherwise, Sammy Sosa is a fraud and all of his home runs are now tainted. He is the only man in history to amass three 60-homer seasons and, to that, we now say: Yeah, right, and how many of them were hit with a legitimate bat?

Maybe if Sosa was a certifiable jerk as Belle was, we wouldn’t care and would merely chalk this up as a legitimate reason not to vote for him for the Hall of Fame. But through all his slugging prowess these past six seasons, Sosa has emerged as baseball’s “happy warrior” as well as a goodwill ambassador for the game both here and abroad in Latin America and Japan. Such was Sosa’s winning personality that we looked the other way at his own considerably enhanced body.

If Sammy insisted he wasn’t then, wasn’t now, wasn’t ever on the juice, we readily believed him.

It has never been done before, but if Sosa is to have his credibility restored, Selig must order X-rays for the four bats (home runs 58, 62 and 66 in ’98 and the 500th this year) that he donated to the Hall of Fame. And, if it turns out any of those were corked, Sosa should be banned from baseball for life and all his home runs be expunged from the record books.

In retrospect, it’s probably a blessing Roger Maris wasn’t around to watch his record obliterated the way it was by McGwire and Sosa. All those years, Maris had to live with the taint of an asterisk next to his record 61 homers because the commissioner of baseball at the time, Ford Frick, deemed it wasn’t the true record since it wasn’t accomplished within 154 games.

In light of the events of Tuesday night at Wrigley, the present commissioner may have no choice but to resurrect that asterisk and apply it to all of Sammy Sosa’s home runs with the denotation “validity in question.”