It tells us we are more ready to punish words than deeds. It tells us that though we profess to crave honesty, being confronted by it makes us angry and fearful.
It tells us how eager we are to pursue a party line, to be consumed by the blood-lust that comes from hunting with the pack.
Forget Mick McCarthy. A million footballing Senator McCarthys are amongst us all of a sudden making those of us who feel Keane does not have a case to answer as if we had married a Communist.
In the case of Keane, the old Sex Pistols adage that no one is innocent has been amended to read that everyone is innocent...apart from the Manchester United captain.
No mention of the provocation Keane may have suffered from Alf Inge Haaland over the course of his career. No consideration of extenuating circumstances at all.
A skirting round of the rather inconvenient fact that the injury that is threatening to end Haaland's playing days concerns his left knee when Keane targeted his right.
And most pertinently of all, no acceptance that if Keane wasn't a man who was suicidally eager to tell the truth about the incident, there would be no question of him being dragged before the FA.
If the FA charge him now, they might as well throw the book at themselves for gross negligence while they're at it.
We all saw what Keane did that afternoon in Manchester 16 months ago. It was an horrific tackle that cannot be defended or excused.
But if the FA chose not to give him anything other than the statutory three-match ban then, why should they be encouraged to go after him now and haul him down to Soho Square?
The assertion that Keane's admission makes this witch-hunt defensible is a laughable hypocrisy propagated by pompous moralisers. They say that he is bringing the game into disrepute and they have not got the wit to recognise the hideous irony of their statement.
Hasn't football sunk far enough already without them wanting to push it down deep into some Hades where honesty itself is considered disreputable?
Charge Ashley Cole with disrepute if you want for taking dive after dive after dive. Charge Dennis Wise for breaking a team-mate's cheekbone in a hotel room.
Charge contract-breakers, charge Carlton and Granada, charge a chairman who sacks a manager before his time. But don't charge Roy Keane for being honest.
There are even some precious little luvvies professing to be horrified by Keane's use of profane language.
Well, excuse me while I roll back my office chair and puke into my wastepaper bin full of old newspapers that have identified those extracts as the most marketable in the whole Keane book.
Part of what is happening here is that the prawn-sandwich merchants so beloved of Mr Keane simply can't handle the idea of football having rough edges.