I ache for the touch of your lips, dear,

But much more for the touch of your whips, dear.

You can raise welts

Like nobody else,

As we dance to the masochism tango.

Tom Lehrer

The comic element of the Max Mosley business is irresistible. It is pure 'Allo 'Allo, mixing Herr Flick of the Gestapo with Colonel Von Strohm and his lust for Yvette with her egg-whisk and wet celery. It's less amusing for Mosley, of course: he is likely to lose his job as president of the FIA, making the rules for world motor sport.

The allegations that he took part in a sado-masochistic orgy with five prostitutes, and the further allegations - which Mosley has denied - that the performance involved dressing up as Nazis and Jewish prisoners are not without their horrifying element. All the same, it is hard to put your finger on what Mosley has done wrong.

Done wrong, as in acted immorally. Most of us find what he has done disgusting. But there is a difference between disgusting and immoral, and it's a distinction worth holding on to.

For if we assume that the allegations are true, and the prostitutes were free agents, we have a crime without a victim. Which makes it no crime at all, merely disgusting behaviour. You could, I suppose, take a harder moral line, from a feminist or religious viewpoint, and say that any form of transaction with prostitutes is immoral, but that's not what the fuss is about. It's not about a few quid for the loan of a body, but a fantastic perverted orgy.

Some have condemned Mosley on the grounds that his alleged behaviour was anti-Semitic, an insult to those who died in the Holocaust and so forth. But insult is a public act; this was merely a private depravity. The fact that it was peeped doesn't put it into the public domain. It appears to demonstrate that Mosley has a sexuality abhorrent to many of us, but that's not racism.

His father is the problem here, of course. Sir Oswald Mosley was the leader of the British Union of Fascists and a professional Jew-hater. His politics were immoral and disgusting. But we're not talking about him, we're talking about his son. If we were all punished for the sins of our fathers we'd all have a pretty thin time of it, though not so bad as our sons.

Perhaps Mosley behaved immorally by deceiving people close to him. But public figures are not sacked for telling lies to their wives. If Mosley is forced to resign, it will not be because he has behaved immorally, it will be because his private amusements disgust people. It will be because car manufacturers are afraid that their association with a disgusting person will affect car sales. That is a commercial, not a moral, stance.

Sport is littered with incidents in which scandal is compounded by the confusion between immoral and disgusting. Hansie Cronje, the South Africa cricket captain, was involved in match-fixing. He was a liar, a hypocrite, a fraud, a man who preyed on the vulnerable. His actions were clearly immoral and had many victims, including us, the people who follow sport.

His deeds also disgusted us. He was destroying something we thought important: that is to say, the beauty and purity of cricket. Cronje would not have been hated had he merely pulled off a fraud on a bank, but our moral judgments were coloured by disgust.

The regular tales of the sexual misbehaviour of footballers always get a hot response. It goes beyond prurience. Non-consensual sex is clearly immoral, but the stories of the involvement of footballers seem much worse than the sexual crimes of others. That is because footballers are rich; their apparent assumption that money permits different moral standards from the rest of us is something we find genuinely disgusting.

Glenn Hoddle lost his job as coach of the England football team because his beliefs disgusted us. In one of the most curious sporting incidents of recent years, Hoddle was sacked for heresy. He said that he believed that the sufferings of disabled people were a punishment visited on them for the sins of a previous life.

Had an Indian cricketer expounded the doctrine of karma, we would not have been disgusted. If Monty Panesar chose to explain the central concepts of Sikhism and the notion of reincarnation, we would not be disgusted. But Hoddle was coach of the England football team and, in this context, his views were not only inappropriate, but were also disgusting.

Hoddle was a wonderfully gifted athlete, utterly exceptional. Had he been especially good in a previous life, to earn such a body and such control over it? This was not a comfortable issue. Hoddle had to go, not because he was immoral, but because we found his sincerely held views disgusting in a person who held such an office.

Drugs remains one of the biggest, if not the biggest, moral issue in sport. Drugs raise passions: there is always fierce, uncompromising, vindictive condemnation of those who get caught. Athletes, officials and journalists compete as to who can say the worst things about convicted drugs cheats. Nothing is too bad for them.

The taking of drugs in sport is immoral because it is against the rules. It is stealing an advantage. It is cheating your fellow competitors; it is also cheating us, the viewers, the paymasters, because we have a strong preference for honest competition.

But that doesn't explain the virulence of our dislike of drugs cheats. That comes because the use of performance-enhancing drugs is not only immoral, it is also disgusting. Ben Johnson says it all: not so much a body as a human-tissue culture, a living Petri dish dedicated to the growth of muscle. And when he got down on the blocks that epochal day at the Seoul Olympic Games of 1988, his eyes were shining yellow.

In his efforts to become superhuman, Johnson had become less than human. What he had done to himself was horrific. It was something that made us profoundly uncomfortable. The fastest man in the history of the world was disgusting. The greatest champion in sport was disgusting. So that, then, was the ultimate achievement of sport: to produce something that disgusted us. No wonder that it is one of the milestone events in the turbulent history of sport.

Johnson was a cheat, but we are not revolted by everyone in sport who cheats. We don't condemn Michael Owen when he dives to win a penalty for England. It's not cheating in itself that offends us, for that is merely immoral. Rather, it is the fact that drug taking disgusts us.

Mosley hasn't behaved in an immoral fashion. He has merely behaved in a manner we consider disgusting and has been found out. The moral, in so far as it can be called a moral, is that it is easier to forgive people for being immoral than for being disgusting.