The fact that George Santos is still drawing a tax-funded salary begs the question of what level of deceit is required to get booted from Congress.

The Santos spectacle invites a second question. Namely, what has become of the whole idea of shame in modern America?

To be clear, there are plenty of longtime causes of shame that we have affirmatively relegated to the past tense. Children born out of wedlock no longer feel society’s scornful reproach.

All kinds of romantic pairings across old lines of race and religion are heartily accepted. My son is able to live a full, unapologetic life as a gay man. Hooray for progress and evolving mores.

But one wonders whether modern culture has gone too far in renouncing shame in concept and practice. As the expression of judgment has gone out of fashion while acceptance and tolerance are all the rage, have we become a better place?

That answer is, at least, in doubt.

No decent person pines for the days when the low-performing student was told to wear a dunce cap. Shame over the course of history was often downright cruel.

But it was also a way of enforcing societal standards, not an all-bad pursuit. Those standards have advanced, mainly for the better if not uniformly so.

These days, we can be all too quick to play the cancellation card, mainly for speech that violates the political code of sensitivity, while we look increasingly askance at the old-fashioned application of shame when someone steps across a bright line of proper conduct.

In many circles of enlightenment, cancellation is in while shame is out.

Peter Stearns, a professor at George Mason University and the author of “Shame: A Brief History,” points out the distance we have come from the colonial days of putting transgressors in public stocks.

The book quotes Benjamin Rush, a founding father and signatory to the Declaration of Independence, “Shaming is universally acknowledged to be a worse punishment than death.”

That might be a bit of hyperbole, but one gets a sense of the prevailing ethos of that era. Somehow, I doubt that self-esteem was valued quite so highly as is the case today. Or that it was a stated goal of much of parenthood and education.

All of which brings us back to the newly elected congressman from Long Island. Whether going by the name of George Santos or Anthony Devolder or Anthony Zabrovsky or Kitara Ravache, the man possesses a vivid imagination, even lacking a true north or any compass point.

He claims to have attended Baruch College (not); to have been a volleyball star there (not); to have an MBA from New York University (not); to have saved over 2,500 dogs and cats through a nonprofit he founded (not); to have worked for Citigroup and Goldman Sachs (not); to have been mugged on the way to deliver an overdue rent check to his landlord (not); and that his mother was a finance executive who worked at the World Trade Center and perished in the Sept. 11 attack (not, not and not).

Nor did he have employees who died in the shooting at the Pulse nightclub. Nor were his grandparents Holocaust refugees. Nor is he a Jew or even “Jew-ish.” And on and on.

What seems to be true is that he performed in drag years ago in Brazil and that he wore a stolen Burberry scarf to a “Stop the Steal” rally. Apparently, he was OK with that particular bit of thievery.

Long Island has bred its cast of unsavory characters over the years. Was Joey Buttafuoco not available to run for this seat?

For Kevin Mccarthy and the Republicans attempting to run the U.S. House by the thinnest of majorities, all of this is embarrassing but not disqualifying. From the back benches of the chamber, Santos provides them with a meek, reliable, acquiescent vote.

Santos is not alone in illustrating how team play now supersedes most any code of reasonable conduct.

When multiple women came forward with credible evidence that Georgia Senate candidate Herschel Walker had urged them to abort developing babies he had fathered, in blatant contradiction of his pro-life stance, no Republican of any stature walked away from him. He was part of the team.

Lest anyone think this is a partisan observation, Democrats did themselves no credit a quarter century back when Bill Clinton’s behavior with a young intern was decidedly unpresidential.

During that firestorm, liberal journalist Nina Burleigh famously commented, “I’d be happy to give Clinton (oral sex) just to thank him for keeping abortion legal.”

Clinton’s antics might not have merited impeachment. But is there any doubt that the response from his party should have been one of disgust, derision and even censure?

I am hardly some killjoy, nor am I free of my own mistakes and breaches. All of us are fallible; none of us are free of our foibles.

But the whole idea of dimension has fallen victim to the all-or-nothing tribalism that rules the day. There is run of the mill political exaggeration and distortion, and then there are Santos’ fantasies and inventions. A country that cannot make that distinction has lost its bearings.

Recent examples are plentiful of the constructive use of public shaming. The “Me Too” movement a few years back was a necessary shock to an old-boys-club sense of entitlement.

Society is doing fine, thank you, with the likes of Harvey Weinstein, Matt Lauer and Kevin Spacey banished to jail cells or distant sidelines. Their disgrace has changed assumptions far and wide of what constitutes appropriate workplace behavior. But George Santos has avoided any such sanction. Which brings this column back to asking how much dishonesty and mendacity does it take to get drummed out of polite society? Or just out of the halls of Congress? Santos’ shame is inescapable and his to bear. But if our institutions fail to enjoin this naked fraudulence, then they are shameless as well.