It’s sure been fun poking fun at Martha Stewart!

Really, has there ever been a juicier target for ridicule?

Playing Miss Perfect on TV. Putting out those preachy magazines. Acting like she had it all figured out — how to spin a bird’s nest out of caramelized sugar, how to lacquer fondant on a four-tier wedding cake, how anything — no matter how awful — can be improved with a little bag of potpourri.

After Wednesday, she’ll need a 30-pound sack.

“It’s a good thing,” Martha told us many times over the years in that aristo-phony accent of hers. Meaning, it seemed: “Do like I’m telling you, and your life could be as perfect as mine.”

Of course, such people are begging for payback.

You can ask Bill Bennett about that, now that he’s left the casino. You can ask those TV preachers who got caught with their trousers down. And now you can ask defendant Martha, who was looking anything but perfect at the courthouse underneath that light umbrella.

No, federal indictment is never a good thing.

But on the way to the boldfaced humiliation, how ’bout one deep breath and a little perspective here?

The Martha Stewart case isn’t exactly Enron, where thousands of workers saw their whole life savings vaporized.

Martha isn’t WorldCom, where the three-card-monte accounting reached $9 billion high. She isn’t even Arthur Andersen, where 28,000 employees were blithely sacrificed on the altar of executive greed.

Compared to the big boys of corporate sleaze, Martha Stewart is small potatoes indeed. So small, in fact, she’d never make the cut in one of those famous summer salads of hers.

“Use the fingerlings,” she’d probably advise. “Far more flavorful.”

Despite the delicious embarrassment of a prim perfectionist extraordinaire, two things were hard to deny Wednesday:

1. If Martha weren’t famous, we wouldn’t be here.

2. And neither would she.

If the claims of the indictment are borne out, this was one greedy woman making one questionable stock trade — then trying to hide her tracks when the regulators got near.

Even U.S. Atty. James Comey seemed to understand that, despite his stern demeanor. “This criminal case is about lying,” he said after the nine-count indictment was unsealed.

That didn’t stop the federal prosecutor from assembling a set of criminal charges that could send the 61-year-old good-living maven to prison for 30 years and sock her with $2 million in fines.

He left the insider-trading issue to the Securities and Exchange Commission, which is filing a civil suit. The evidence for that charge was found too flimsy for a criminal trial.

Martha’s lawyers, Bob Morvillo and John Tigue, kind of had a point when they emphasize the absence of the underlying charge. “It is most ironic,” they said in their statement, “that Ms. Stewart faces criminal charges for obstructing an investigation which established her innocence.”

Why? they asked.

“Is it for publicity purposes because Martha Stewart is a celebrity? Is it because she is a woman who has successfully competed in a man’s business world by virtue of her talent, hard work and demanding standards? Is it because the government would like to be able to define securities fraud as whatever it wants it to be? Or is it because the Department of Justice is attempting to divert the public’s attention from its failure to charge the politically connected managers of Enron and WorldCom who may have fleeced the public out of billions of dollars?”

There’s a difference, it’s been said, between insider traders and the rest of us. The difference is the quality of their tips.

Sadly, the rest of us are never tempted by secret information we could make easy money from.

If we were, who knows?

Maybe we too would be dumping our ImClone shares, moments before they fall.