As most people probably know by now, the Sunday Herald opted for an extraordinary front page yesterday, showing the barely redacted face of the football personality at the centre of the superinjunction storm. More pertinently from a legal standpoint, the paper names the player on its inside pages, confident that its Scottish-only circulation will mean that it hasn’t broken a law that applies only in England and Wales.

While many applaud the bravery and determination of the Herald of being a harbinger of truth, was it a wise move?

I’m no lawyer so I guess I should be satisfied that Scotland’s favourite legal expert, not to mention Paul McBride QC, believe that the Sunday Herald has not done anything illegal but, nonetheless, here in London I saw that front page via Twitter so either the Scottish paper or the US social media company have broken the law. Furthermore, does it suggest to readers, bloggers and twitterers that they could and should also fly the flag of free speech and also name the player? Getting seduced into thinking you’re fighting the good fight is risky when you don’t have a legal budget.

The newspaper is also picking a rather odd battle here. This story is about who bonked who, public interest is minimal and the whole sorry tale should in theory only be good for the grubby, loathsome red-tops. The Sunday Herald will have boosted its circulation primarily because non-Twitterers will want to know who slept with Imogen Thomas, a factoid that wouldn’t have been so interesting if she hadn’t appeared in Big Brother. See how lame this all is? Salaciousness has pricked our curiosity, not for the first time and it certainly won’t be the last.

And yet, I am a hypocrite of the highest order in writing the above. I wouldn’t touch the Sun with a bargepole but I was on Twitter like a shot, quickly finding out who all the footballers were and which journalists are possibly facing charges this weekend. So, the most fascinating aspect of this whole issue for me is the goading that superinjunctions seem to carry. Ordinarily we wouldn’t give two hoots about these stories but once we learn that a rich person has paid money to stop us knowing something, we’re all over it like a rash. Psychologists may be able to explain it but it is a quite bizarre phenomenon. Who cares who Fred Goodwin had an affair with, superinjunction or not? Well, frustratingly, I do and yet I don’t, all at the same time.

And to further add to my hypocrisy, despite dismissing this as the domain of red-tops, I was right proud of the Sunday Herald’s stance yesterday. It was State of Play, it was West Wing and it was what most of us want to see from a free press – journalists zeroing in on problems within our country and presenting the problem in an eye-catching but intelligent, logical manner. Clearly, on some level, this story does actually run deeper than tabloid bonking.

The bottom line is though, the law is the law. Pundits have lined up all week to proclaim how unsustainable these superinjunctions are, and they are correct, but none of them that I heard made the point that, for these specific cases, a judge has made this decree and we should all just accept it. Arguing against the general principle of a legal system for the rich and a legal system for the rest of us is a separate and worthy objective but, in the meantime, we all have to accept the law. Individual users of Napster were targetted by recording companies back in the day and made to pay for their illegal behaviour, a move that caused genuine fear amongst the users of illegal music downloading. If I was this footballer’s lawyer, I would instruct the same zero tolerance and go after @billybob1234 and @suemaclfoggerty3234 for breaking the superinjunction, not just the journalists.

And should that “all” extend to the Sunday Herald? I suspect we’ll find out soon and, hopefully, Scotland will back the Sunday Herald by buying it more often from here on in too. Yesterday was a timely reminder of a newspaper’s important place in a nation’s structure.