If Barry Bonds spends one day in jail, something has gone wrong in this country.

Many of my colleagues reacted with glee at his indictment on charges of perjury and obstruction of justice. They expressed sadness for the game of baseball, waxed poetic about justice finally being served and, of course, demanded that the all-important asterisk be placed next to his remarkable numbers.

The Bonds case disturbs me, but not for all of the same reasons as a lot of people.

What he did if he did it – and it’s well documented in the book Game of Shadows that he used steroids – was illegal.

By the way, that book was made possible by obtaining secret grand jury testimony, also illegal. An attorney who leaked the information to the reporters is serving a 21â2-year sentence in prison.

Had he not come forward, the authors could have faced jail time for not revealing their source. I’m not suggesting that would have been a good thing. It’s just that Bonds isn’t the only one here who possibly committed a crime.

And the Bonds case can’t simply be about a crime. He may have been ill-advised to lie, and, yes, perjury is a serious offense.

But let’s step away from the technicalities to look at the severity of what Bonds did.

If he perjured himself, he lied about the fact that he took a drug to make him stronger to hit baseballs farther. He did it because he believed that Mark McGwire and Sammy Sosa, who had shattered Roger Maris’ 37-year-old home run record in 1998, had beefed up on steroids.

(If you’re going to base your outrage at Bonds on legalities, then you have to put McGwire and Sosa in the Hall of Fame. They never tested positive for anything and are guilty of nothing other than gaining massive amounts of muscle in their 30s and clamming up in front of a Senate committee. Those aren’t crimes.)

Reviewing Bonds’ accomplishments and taking a new perspective on his Hall of Fame worthiness is one thing. Throwing him behind bars is quite another.

There is an uncomfortable witch hunt atmosphere to both the BALCO investigation and Major League Baseball’s Mitchell investigation, the results of which are to be released soon.

If Bonds is guilty, it’s for doing something before baseball implemented testing. Since testing has been introduced, well over 100 major and minor league players have tested positive for performance enhancers.

They aren’t bound for jail.

They didn’t lie to a jury, I understand, but, normally, an investigation into a drug operation is designed to put the seller in jail. The purchasers, yeah, they’re guilty of a crime, too, but they aren’t the target.

It seems Bonds is such an unlikable figure to everyone – virtually all non-Giants fans, the media, teammates and other players – that there is a vengeful zeal to see this man crushed publicly.

Can McGwire be presumed guilty without evidence? That’s already been the case in the court of baseball writers’ opinion. He failed to make the Hall of Fame this past summer, and it wasn’t because he lacked the numbers.

If we can find him guilty in the absence of evidence, I think we should also be able to determine that Bonds is guilty of a crime against baseball, not society.

As unsympathetic a figure as he is, Bonds should not be sentenced to jail. And if he gets jail time, maybe the man in Washington who called to congratulate him in August can do for Bonds the same thing he did for another perjurer named Scooter Libby.