How often have you thought, as you watched some film about the Mob, or some television series about corruption in high places, that, as entertaining as it might be, it fails a basic plausibility test?

We know that people do bad things, stupid things. But there's a clichéd theatricality about it all on the screen that leaves it looking more like entertaining parody than realism. Nobody actually tries to pull off that stuff, do they? The language is especially overdone. Nobody really speaks like that, surely?

Ladies and gentlemen, meet Rod Blagojevich, the Democratic Governor of the great state of Illinois. Mr Blagojevich was indicted on Tuesday on corruption charges after federal investigators caught him on tape discussing ways in which he might personally profit from his authority to name someone to a vacant seat in the US Senate.

The official transcript captures the Governor's deliberations with his aides in a language, and, it would seem, a tone, straight out of a Mob movie:

“I've got this thing and it's f****** golden and uh, uh I'm just not giving it up for f****** nothing,” he says, referring to the Senate seat.

If he doesn't get the price he's looking for, he warns possible buyers, he might just take the seat in Washington himself.

“Unless I get something real good, shit, I'll just send myself. You know what I'm saying?”

It's not clear from the transcript whether he had cotton wool balls in his mouth as he spoke but it seems a reasonable bet.

It would be a terrific story in any circumstances, but, of course, what makes it tinglingly compelling is that the Senate seat in question is the one that was recently vacated by none other than Barack Obama, after he was elected president.

There's nothing to implicate Mr Obama in any wrongdoing. In fact Mr Blagojevich is evidently irritated at how uncooperative the Obama people have been. One of the possible Senate candidates is a close associate of Mr Obama's. The Governor clearly tries to dangle the bait of giving her the seat in exchange for some juicily remunerative position in the Obama administration or in some other sinecure. But the Obama people don't bite, and it's indicated instead that he should serve out his term as Governor for the next two years.

As the Governor makes clear, again, in language that suggests too many nights spent in front of HBO, this was not what he was expecting .

“Suck it up for two years and give this motherf****** [the President-elect] his senator? F*** him. For nothing? F*** him.”

So is there any real threat to the incoming Obama team from the Blago tapes? (It can't be long, by the way, before the English idiom, “to blag”, meaning to obtain something by dubious means, crosses the Atlantic. Q: “What's that?” A: “It's a Senate seat I just blagged from some guy in Chicago.”)

Some Democrats worry that the scale and brazenness of the Governor's behaviour might implicate the President-elect by association. After all, Mr Obama rose through the ranks of Illinois Democratic politics and certainly never did much about challenging the corrupt culture.

Corruption in Illinois is like snow in Minnesota. Hardly news. Mr Blagojevich, in fact, became the fifth of the past eight governors of the state to have been indicted. That's a higher proportion than among professional footballers. Heck, it's a higher proportion than among immediate members of Mob families.

Yet, even so, his behaviour suggests the problem in the President-elect's home state must be startlingly endemic. The reason the Governor was being taped was that he was already under investigation on corruption allegations. So here is a man, already under investigation, freely talking about shopping a Senate seat to the highest bidder, as well as, by the way, telling the owner of the local newspaper to fire an editor who wrote something critical about him if he wants state help in the sale of some of his property.

Still, it's unlikely that people will find themselves shocked to discover that bad things have been going on in Illinois. Without any evidence of a direct connection to Mr Obama, this corruption won't hurt him.

What might inflict some damage, however, is the familiar American torture of legal process that will now unfold.

The problem is this. Even if he's done nothing wrong, Mr Obama and his aides will doubtless have said and done things in the past few weeks they don't want made public: that's the way government works. But now much of what they have done will be subjected to the blowtorch of prosecutorial scrutiny and suddenly more attentive media.

That will require a delicate dance around falsehood to preserve the obligatory confidences of politics. It will call for an exercise of tremendous balletic skills not to trip up. For example, when asked about any connection between himself and Mr Blagojevich this week, Mr Obama said: “I had no contact with the Governor or his office and so we were not... I was not aware of what was happening.”

Note the change from first person plural to first person singular midway through that sentence.

Then there was the correction issued this week by David Axelrod, his principal adviser, of something he said a few weeks ago. Mr Axelrod had previously stated that Mr Obama had discussed his Senate replacement with Mr Blagojevich. Now Mr Axelrod says he misspoke.

Again, there's nothing necessarily suspicious about any of this. But it suggests a steadily increasing pressure on an already highly pressured political team. It risks prising out of them all kinds of information that they might not want to share.

The danger in all this is clear. Mr Obama would like to keep the focus in the next few weeks on his new Cabinet, his immediate legislative goals, his plans to pull America out of its current mess. Instead he will be spending time issuing denials, treading carefully through a legal minefield of prior statements, past associations, reported meetings and private conversations.

He wants the sound that greets his presidency to be an operatic overture of hope; not the foul-mouthed mumblings of a politician who sounds like he stepped out of The Sopranos.

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