If there was one key to Joe Torre’s success over the 12 years he spent with the Yankees, it was that he was honorable. When the team won he gave others the credit, and when they lost he took the blame. This is why he was respected. Anyone could have won with the talent he was given, but under Torre, the Yankees won — and lost — graciously.

This makes the squalid end of Torre’s tenure all the sadder. Yesterday, the Yankees announced that Torre had declined the team’s offer to return as manager next year. They also announced the terms of the offer, which the team clearly did not expect him to accept. He was offered a 23% pay cut in the form of a one-year, $5 million contract, with incentives that would have paid him up to $3 million and guaranteed an $8 million salary for 2009 if the team won the pennant.

“We just think it’s important to motivate people,” said Randy Levine, the team’s president, who apparently believes that the reason Torre hasn’t won a World Series since 2000 is that he hasn’t been motivated.

The honorable thing to do, when you want to fire someone, is to fire them. Torre is a grown man who’s been in baseball for 47 years. He would not have jumped off a bridge had the Yankees told him they didn’t want him back. Nor would the team’s fans have been unable to accept that the Yankees had decided the time for change had come. Making an insulting offer and then pointing out how wonderful it is, as Levine did when he noted that under the contract Torre would have remained the highest-paid manager in baseball, is a rather inept way to pretend you haven’t sacked someone.

It is, of course, possible that this offer was tendered in full sincerity; if that’s true, though, the Yankees are being run by morons. Since the Yankees are not in fact run by morons, the only conclusion to draw is that they’re being run by people willing to behave dishonorably. This is a shame for Torre, who deserved to be treated with more respect. It’s also a shame for fans.

Common decency is something the public has come to expect from the Yankees over the past 12 years, but it isn’t something anyone should take as a given. George Steinbrenner may be thought of these days as a charming rogue, but he’s also the same man who pleaded guilty to the serious crime of making illegal campaign contributions to Richard Nixon and paid a gambler tens of thousands of dollars to spy on one of his own star players. Yankeeland was a tyranny, ruled over by sentimentality and impetuous whims, and the chaos brought disaster down on the team, which went 18 years without winning a World Series before Torre’s arrival, by far the longest stretch in team history.

All those years, though, the problem wasn’t Steinbrenner’s boorishness. That was just a symptom of the real disease, which was the chaos. By trading prospects, signing star players and then demanding someone get rid of them, and changing managers mid-season more often than not, the unpredictable owner made it impossible for anyone to put a long-term plan in place, because no one could be sure they would be allowed to see it through. This culminated in the dark years of 1989 to 1992, the only time in team history when they lost more than they won four years in a row.

The sad handling of Torre’s firing isn’t just a throwback to the past in its weird indecency, but in the way that indecency was an inevitable result of a structural problem. In the past, that was Steinbrenner’s capriciousness. Today, it’s that no one is clearly in charge.

It was just this year that the man widely thought to be Steinbrenner’s appointed heir, son-in-law Steve Swindal, was thrust out into the cold after his wife filed for divorce. This led to the elevation to power of Steinbrenner’s sons Hank and Hal, announced this past weekend. Having two men atop one hierarchy is bad enough, and having two men who weren’t groomed to be atop it is worse. Account for the independent power base general manager Brian Cashman has built up over the past few years and the presence of old school Steinbrenner retainers, and every decision the team makes is, of course, going to be contested and treated as another theater in an ongoing proxy war.

None of this reflects badly on anyone involved. It’s what happens in any bureaucracy that lacks clear lines of authority. Still, firing someone by offering them an insulting contract is exactly what you’d expect from a bureaucracy that doesn’t know how to, and perhaps can’t, make up its own mind.

This isn’t a time for the Yankees to be dealing with this kind of disorder. The team needs a new manager, it needs to decide on whether or not to offer Alex Rodriguez a new contract so good he’ll forego his right to hear other team’s offers, it needs to negotiate with Mariano Rivera and Jorge Posada, and it needs to decide whether trusting 60% of the team’s starts to Philip Hughes, Ian Kennedy, and Joba Chamberlain is really a good idea. Any one of these would be challenge enough for a perfectly focused organization. A divided one dealing with all three of them at once invites disaster.

The Yankees’ dark years were the result of bad choices made worse by the fact that only one man’s opinion mattered. A return to the early 1990s isn’t in the offing any time soon; this team has too much talent. But soon enough the Yankees may discover that there’s something just as bad as only one opinion counting, and that’s not having one opinion that counts above all.

tmarchman@nysun.com