A FOUL ODOR IN THE HALL; TAYLOR IS PROOF CANTON IS LACKING.

Byline: KAREN CROUSE

Let's get this straight. The President of the United States can commit adultery and perjury and a majority of voters consider it largely irrelevant because what he chooses to do when he's not keeping the world safe for democracy is his own damn business.

At the same time, the off-the-field felonies of a linebacker who redefined the position is highly relevant to a good many of the voters who will decide on Saturday whether or not to keep the Pro Football Hall of Fame safe from hypocrisy.

It doesn't reflect well on our society when Lawrence Taylor is held to a higher moral standard than President Clinton. Or do you find nothing twisted about a society that places the behavioral bar higher for its professional athletes than for its politicians?

Taylor's recreational drug use became a problem in 1985. We know this not because he was tripped up by Linda, his ex-wife. He said so himself on page 126 of his 1987 autobiography, ``Living on the Edge.''

As with Clinton, Taylor's reckless personal behavior didn't keep him from earning high marks on the job. In 1985, his fifth year in the NFL, he recorded 71 tackles and a career-high 12.5 sacks. In 1986, after a half-hearted stint in a drug-rehab center, Taylor earned MVP honors after collecting 85 tackles and 20.5 sacks during a season that culminated with a resounding win over Denver in Super Bowl XXI.

In 13 seasons with the New York Giants, Taylor averaged 10.6 sacks and appeared in 10 Pro Bowls. He turned a gritty position into a glamorous one at the expense of the league's resident glamourpusses. Indeed, quarterbacks would watch Taylor like a pilot does his altimeter, so cognizant were they of how quickly he could bring them down.

Based solely on his Sundays, he's a shoo-in for the Hall of Fame as a first-year inductee. Off-the-field behavior isn't supposed to cloud the voting. In the bylaws it clearly states that a nominee's achievements and contributions in professional football are to be the sole criteria.

It's a good thing, that, because last time we checked, the 194 members included: someone who sat out a season for gambling on NFL games; an accused murderer; a few slaves of the bottle; the adulterous husband of a grating talk-show host and one guy who admitted in his autobiography to having slapped women around (when he wasn't sleeping with as many as four in one night).

With heroes like those, who needs villains? For all we know, Taylor had the truth in his grasp when he told reporters earlier this week during a conference call, ``If we start worrying about off-the-field stuff, then you'd have to kick out half the guys already (inducted).''

For sure, it must be a terrific burden to have lived as righteously as the one voter who acknowledged the other day that Taylor ``might have been one of the two or three greatest defensive players who ever lived. But he just hasn't lived the kind of life of the guy I'm going to put in the Hall of Fame.''

You know, as opposed to O.J. Simpson, who was inducted in 1985.

A decade later the former USC star would stand trial for the murders of his ex-wife, Nicole Simpson, and her friend, Ronald Goldman. Simpson was acquitted by a criminal jury in a trial cluttered with unsavory details of his past, held liable for the deaths in the subsequent civil case and continues to be tried in the court of public opinion.

Or were the 36 Hall of Fame voters who'll cast their ballots on the eve of Sunday's Super Bowl XXXIII in Miami too busy soaking up the free sun and suds in South Beach to notice the sand kicked up by Simpson's selection by ESPN as one of North America's 50 greatest athletes of the 20th century?

In 1989, 18 years after his Pro Football Hall of Fame induction, another of the century's greatest athletes wrote a tell-all autobiography that read like a supermarket tabloid. The Hall monitors who are indignant about the possibility of having to explain Taylor's induction to impressionable teens must have been thrilled to read running back Jim Brown's accounts of hosting ``what most people call orgies.''

Or his admission that he slapped a live-in girlfriend and a few other women. Or his observation that elite athletes ``aren't characters in a storybook. They will be weak and carnal and greedy and confused.''

Which brings us to one of the latest NFL literary offerings, ``Pros and Cons: The Criminals Who Play in the NFL.'' The book, co-written by Jeff Benedict and Don Yaeger, hit the bookstores this past October at roughly the same time Taylor was charged with possession of crack cocaine after trying to buy $50 worth of the drug from an undercover detective in St. Petersburg, Fla.

The authors' research revealed that 21 percent of the 509 players in the NFL whose records they were able to cull had been formally charged with a serious crime. Many of them were repeat offenders. Given the climate Benedict and Yaeger described and the priggishness of today's Hall monitors, we can expect the Pro Football Hall of Fame to become a tougher place to crack than the LPGA Hall of Fame was before it relaxed its performance criteria.

It's curious, how some of the same media members who exalted Taylor when he played with a shredded shoulder or gimpy knees are now quick to condemn him. It would seem Sunday soldiers can earn their medals of bravery and courage, so long as their truculence doesn't spill over into the rest of the week.

But all too often it does. Julian Morrow, a New York-based sports psychologist, recently told USA Today, ``What makes a player successful on the field - anger, risk-taking, limited impulse control - may not make him someone you want living next door.''

Taylor, a deadbeat dad and longtime drug abuser, is the ideal neighbor if your address is 2121 George Halas Dr. NW, Canton, Ohio.

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PHOTO (Color) Lawrence Taylor says his actions away from football should not sway Hall of Fame voters.

George Miller/Associated Press