It was the fingernail you had to love —the one on which Lindsay Lohan had explicitly painted in tiny letters everything a hoisted middle finger means.

It’s hard to get a realistic sense of the space in L. A. courtrooms from TV pictures, but it’s reasonable to assume that they’re smaller than they look. Even so, it was unlikely that Judge Marsha Revel was able to read the message on Lohan’s middle finger until that day’s appearance of the online photo version of Hollywood’s favorite slow-motion train wreck.

It doesn’t take a genius to figure out that a lawyer might want to get as far as possible from a client who thinks she’s found a clever way to flip the bird to a judge. It also doesn’t take a genius to figure out that Lindsay Lohan could hire the entire American Bar Association but her chances of getting a commutation of her 90-day sentence from Revel are, at the moment, somewhere around the chances of pigs flying and a cold day in hell.

You have to be a very special kind of idiot, spoiled brat to think you’re going to get away with flipping off a judge in court.

Given what we know about the life of this beautiful, marginally talented young actress, 90 days in the slammer might provide a pretty fair purchase on common sense — a radical one and one not without risks, but still one that could instill in her a sense of reality.

Lohan—the longtime poster girl for TMZ—doesn’t matter and never really has, no matter how sad this whole bottom- feeding spectacle is. (Kudos to Craig Ferguson who, long ago, confessed his own past substance abuse problems and said he wasn’t going to do any Lohan jokes because he didn’t find her situation at all funny.)

Mel Gibson, though, does matter. And now that Radar Online has made HIM its poster boy and has begun uploading rants of Mel raging at his estranged girlfriend (complete with promised Nwords), the Gibson story just gets worse and worse. Heaven knows he isn’t the first screwy old actor to lose it over an involvement with an uncontrollable younger woman, but with his public rap sheet already bursting with anti-Semitic drool, the new evidence presented to HIS probationary hearing with the court of public opinion can’t help but be damaging, perhaps fatal, to his career. And that’s a very sad thing for a once-interesting actor and, in “Braveheart” and “Apocalypto,” crazily talented filmmaker.

I can’t help but admire the rich, ground-level sources—especially the legal ones—of both TMZ and Radar Online. But no one is even trying to get true perspective. They’re happy to have the quick, ambiguous hits, the candid camera outrages and mega-tweets of the blogosphere, like toots of an illegal drug. Meanwhile, people who might be able to say something interesting and are full of perspective can maintain wise and stoic silence.

All through the Gibson follies, I’ve wanted to hear from his “Lethal Weapon” series director Richard Donner, a Jew whose family name is Schwartzberg. And, as well now, Danny Glover, who was not only Gibson’s co-star but is a well-known political activist of the left.

Will someone please get both of these guys to sit down for a minute or two and give the world perspective on the lunatic contents of Gibson’s head? He’s talented enough to be worth the major effort.

Lohan isn’t, heaven knows, but even in that, there are people of seasoned years and major consequence—Jane Fonda, for one—who’ve worked with her and might even be convinced to send her a message through the media world the screwed-up kid clearly lives for.

Or not. Why bother trying to get a full picture when the little dots on the radar screen suffice?

The ones that go blip blip blip blip.