The latest twist in the Adrian Peterson saga — his penalty now essentially almost a season-long suspension pending grievances, arbitrations and maybe even an appearance before Judge Judy — the more I am disappointed in the way Roger Goodell operates as the NFL commissioner.

In fact, and I never thought I would say this, watching Goodell operate makes me long for the good old days of Paul Tagliabue.

We — and I include myself in that — used to criticize Tagliabue because he studied to death everything that came before him. It used to appear that Tagliabue would delay, postpone and obfuscate in the belief that a problem would dissolve itself if he just waited long enough to do something about it.

But the fact of the matter is that Tagliabue looked at things with the experienced eye of a high-priced attorney who practiced before the nation’s highest courts, which he was and did. And, no matter what you thought of Tagliabue, he served 17 years as commissioner with nary a moment’s labor strife.

Which is another way of saying that, regardless of how particular situations were handled, the bottom line on his regime was a good one.

Goodell, on the other hand, operates like a politician with his finger to the wind to judge the shifting sands of public opinion.

Particularly this year.

Ever since he came off as too soft in the first reaction from the NFL in the Ray Rice case, Goodell seems to be bending over backward to be known as the law-and-order commissioner. Clearly, this is not a good time to be a miscreant in the NFL.

Yet, while he may be right to worry about the image the NFL players (and did we mention a certain Indianapolis owner who has had some issues, too) present, Goodell has gone overboard.

Tagliabue could give him some advice on things like due process and deliberation. Oh, yeah. Tagliabue did give him some advice with his slapdown following the Saints’ Bountygate case.

It doesn’t seem to have taken.

You don’t have to like what Ray Rice did, which was abhorrent. You don’t have to like what Adrian Peterson or others have done.

But there are a lot of things the NFL does that I don’t like, too. I was reminded of that just last Sunday at Soldier Field when they unfurled a humongous United States flag before kickoff while military jets whizzed over the stadium.

Your tax dollars at work.

I’m sure if you looked at the manufacturer’s label on the flag, it would have said it was made in some far-off country. The NFL likes to have it both ways. I recall all the flag-waving after 9/11 and even the Super Bowl pin at the end of that season, wrapped in a flag.

Yet when I checked out one of the “official” souvenir stands at that Super Bowl, I noticed that the league was selling NFL properties merchandise that had been made in a couple dozen countries — but not a single item made in the U.S. Yes, I checked all the labels.

Or did you ever try to count all the beer commercials on an average Sunday of NFL viewing? I understand the need of the league and the networks to sell commercials. It is a business, after all. But while the NFL is raking in all that cash from pushing alcohol, it is telling us — much less frequently — how bad all that alcohol is for us.

Which brings me back to the point of all this. Adrian Peterson.

Maybe this case was different. Maybe there was no precedent for what Peterson did.

Nonetheless, the league needs to have some clear and unambiguous guidelines for punishment and for how it expects players and others in its employ to act. And it needs to understand that the worker bees have some rights, too, no matter how repugnant we might find some of their actions.

Lurching from crisis to crisis is not a good look for the nation’s richest and most popular sports league.

Then again, maybe Mark Cuban was on to something with his prediction of an NFL “implosion” within 10 years.

Ira Miller is an award-winning sportswriter who has covered the National Football League for more than three decades and is a member of the Pro Football Hall of Fame Selection Committee. He is a national columnist for The Sports Xchange.