Peter Lawwell, the Celtic chief executive, has been in the dog-house.

Why? Well, he cracked a joke - or made a "jibe" depending on your colours - at Rangers' expense. Yesterday the Scottish Football Association decreed that no action should be taken over Lawwell's inference about Rangers being a new club, but the incident has served as a barometer for our delicate state in Scottish football.

For a number of reasons this is where we have arrived in 2013 in the Scottish game: a line, a gag, a contentious observation such as Lawwell's now threatens to bring down the judicial hammer. We live in highly sensitive times.

Older football observers will well recall the day when the game regarded ribaldry and put-down as a part of its lifeblood. Others merely referred to this as "rivalry". For decades Rangers and Celtic, like other city rivals, have occasionally traded verbal brickbats which some loved, some disliked, but over which very few mopped their brow.

It is all very different now. The liquidation of Rangers Football Club plc last year has deposited an unwanted seam of anger and bitterness on one side and, football being football, much crowing and guffawing on the other. Now Lawwell, a Celtic CEO who would do well to avoid these things, has got caught in the crossfire.

There is little need to labour what all this is about. The question of Rangers FC, and whether it is a new club or not following Charles Green's relaunch, does not exercise the minds of most Old Firm fans. But from those for whom it does, much noise and hot air emanate. Every day pockets of Rangers and Celtic fans are ranting about it on social media sites.

Lawwell has made his own view clear: he thinks of Rangers as a new club. His comment at Celtic's annual general meeting, that "Rory Bremner can pretend to be Tony Blair" in reference to Rangers today, made that pretty plain. The outcome of his comment was predictable. The Celtic punters at that agm were howling their approval, while Rangers took quite a huff and made an official complaint to the SFA.

There is a certain irony in all of this, given that the first 20 years of my covering the Old Firm required, on the Rangers side, a regular communion with Sir David Murray. Whatever else Murray got up to in those days, one thing he was never sluggish about was his verbal one-upmanship over Celtic.

Murray's most famous comment - "for every fiver Celtic spend, we'll spend a tenner" - did not just prophecy a dire Rangers fate in the long-term, but also typified his robust approach to these matters.

Let there be no doubt: had this recent liquidation episode struck Celtic instead of Rangers, and had Murray still been in power, then the goading and baiting coming out of Ibrox would have been relentless. This was the David Murray way and this colour, this up-and-at-'em style, was manna to the newspapers. It fed headlines and phone-ins galore. In the old days brash club owners were revered for their lippy talk and boisterous approach.

With Lawwell, though, it has all been a bit more complicated. Not least because, on top of being the Celtic chief executive, he also sits on the SFA board. So his quip - or jibe - about Rangers has caused the governing body quite a bit of embarrassment. Just about the last thing the SFA needed was for Vincent Lunny, its compliance officer, to spend time weighing up a potential disrepute charge against a supposedly responsible member of his own organisation's board.

For his part, Lawwell is said to be seething about the fuss, believing the case to be a further example of the way football is going all po-faced. But that only half washes.

Celtic itself can be pretty earnest as a club. It prides itself on many things, such as its charity foundation and social conscience, but some supporters are less than self-effacing in the way they go about it all. The joke goes that, amid much of this charity work, the Celtic fan "crows about how good he is". Sometimes charity is less impressive when it comes with a certain boast.

No-one will convince me that, had a David Murray or a Dave King made a gag about Celtic being a new club, figures like Lawwell would not have expressed their disgust at the taunt. Since the 2012 fate of Rangers we have come to appreciate anew how cherished a club's history actually is, and how touchy people are when the L-word is mentioned.

Yesterday, in deciding that Lawwell had no case to answer, it took an amount of tut-tutting from Campbell Ogilvie, a disapproving SFA president, to bring closure to it all. He made a comment about the Old Firm's "erosion of mutual respect". But at close quarters at Ibrox over many years he would have witnessed plenty goading at Celtic's plight, especially during Rangers' nine-in-a-row dominance. We all did.

One man's joke has been another man's disrespectful jibe. In truth, when we look back in the following months, this Lawwell incident will seem a tuppence ha'penny controversy. But today, it is a sign of our delicate times. No jokes or quips, please, at our stricken clubs.