The findings of an review panel formed by the Salt Lake City Olympic organizers to assess the extent of the corruption and bribery surrounding the 2002 Winter Games are devastating: At least $4 million in cash, gifts and favors were handed out to 24 International Olympic Committee members — lavish vacations and bogus business deals for IOC members; make-work jobs and phony scholarships for their children. The former head of the Salt Lake effort even pilfered $30,000 from his daughter’s college trust fund to make a payoff.

Still, there is a bright side. The panel concluded that, although there are rampant ethical transgressions of the Olympic ideal, they saw nothing criminal.

The final word on that, of course, will come from the Justice Department, which is conducting its own expedition into the swamp created by the IOC racketeers and Salt Lake’s movers and shakers. It’s not hard to imagine that the creation of sham corporations to launder money solicited under false pretenses and the under-the-table bankrolling of do-nothing jobs so IOC offspring could skirt U.S. immigration law will amount to violations beyond pesky old ethics.

Salt Lake City is not the first town to slavishly humble itself at the IOC’s feet. Losing bidders for the 2002 games did it, just not as effectively. Same goes for games in the recent past and not-too-distant future. The question is how to stop it.

Don’t expect much from the IOC. Exposed as the gold-medal winner for greed, the IOC slapped itself on the wrist, but made sure not to leave a welt. It has issued a couple of warnings to members sloppy enough to get caught, it has suspended a few pending further investigation (or pending the whole mess blowing over). Chairman Juan Antonio Samaranch, on whose watch the Olympics has been degraded by junk sports, unabated drug use and bribery, refuses to resign unless there is a guarantee his successor will be IOC member Kim Ul Yong of South Korea. It was Kim’s son, incidentally, who kept his green card by landing a $75,000-per-year duty-free job with a Utah communications company, with his salary reimbursed by the Salt Lake Olympic Committee.

Congress has been conspicuously silent about this national embarassment, which is odd considering that American taxpayers are footing the bill for some $150 million in Olympic-oriented transportation projects in Utah.

Some blame the commercialization of the Olympics for this mess, so it is interesting that the only get-tough response comes from commercial interests. Corporate sponsors — all those companies such as Coca-Cola, Kodak, McDonald’s, IBM — who pay dearly for the right to use the Olympic symbol in their ads are demanding that if the IOC does not clean up its act with substantive reforms, it can peddle its overpriced rings elsewhere.

John Hancock Insurance, one of the biggest sponsors, has gone one step further — in addition to withholding its IOC payments, it has suspended negotiations with NBC on $20 million in advertising. NBC paid some $450 million for the broadcast rights to the 2002 games. A few more John Hancocks and the network that squeezes snippets of the pole vault and speed skating into its extensive coverage of beach volleyball and ice dancing is in real trouble. There would be no point, after all, in selling out the ideal of fostering international understanding through honest athletic competition if nobody could tune in to watch.