Former Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Green-span, renowned for his penchant for understatement, was uncharacteristically direct on Sunday.

Greenspan said that Standard & Poor’s “hit a nerve” by announcing Friday that it would downgrade the United States’ credit rating.

“They’ve (S&P) handled themselves very poorly,” Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner said hours before announcing he’ll continue in his post. “They’ve shown a stunning lack of knowledge about the basic U.S. fiscal budget math.”

“No matter what some agency may say, we’ve always been and always will be a AAA country,” President Barack Obama said.

This public relations offensive against S&P as a result of the downgrade strikes us as ironic.

Many of the same government officials, financial gurus and talking heads who chastised bond rating houses for not warning Americans of the debilitating weakness of financial giants that were “too big to fail” now maintain S&P acted unfairly in downgrading the U.S. rating.

Never mind that S&P and others have warned for months that the U.S. government is on increasingly shaky financial ground, and that we won’t be able to service our debt if something isn’t done soon.

Never mind that the recent agreement between Congress and the White House to raise the nation’s debt limit is far from a formula for economic renaissance, but at best a temporary Band-Aid. Never mind that our total debt is about $14 trillion, and S&P was hoping for $4 trillion in budget cuts in 10 years. (The deal reached was for $2.4 trillion in cuts).

Never mind that the fundamental problem with our national spending addiction — a seemingly endless array of entitlement programs that benefit millions of Americans who once took pride in their self-reliance — is largely ignored in budget reform talks. Never mind that the largest of those entitlements, Social Security and Medicare, have unfunded liabilities totaling about $60 trillion.

Never mind all that. The problem, we’re told by many shaking heads in Washington and Wall Street, is that S&P has quit preaching and gone to meddling. Rather than merely warn that decades of poor fiscal policy could harm our creditworthiness, S&P actually blew the whistle and called a foul.

Call us contrarian, but this strikes us as exactly the kind of thing that the officials wearing the striped shirts are supposed to do.

There is no question that the credit downgrade hurts our nation at an extremely critical time. But here’s the thing about a tough penalty with the game on the line: it puts everyone in the stadium on notice that no matter how sloppily it’s been played until now, order will be enforced going forward. It announces with clarity to the team owners, players, coaches and fans that someone with clout is watching — and that finally, they will call them as they see them.

Some purveyors of gloom say the downgrading of America’s credit rating could be the beginning of the end of our nation’s greatness. We fervently hope, however, that is simply the end of an ugly quarter.

Given Monday’s plunge of the Dow Jones industrial average by 630 points — a 5.5 percentage point drop —  a change in investment climate is obvious. Encouraging, however, is that interest rates haven’t yet skyrocketed as a result of S&P’s tough-love rating.

Good teams can go on to win when the refs tighten up their game-calling. Discipline, sacrifice and determination are essential.

Obama gave lip service to that line of thinking Monday, saying that if America’s leaders exhibit more “common sense and compromise,” we can tame our staggering accumulation of debt.

We hope he truly means that. We hope he and the rest of Washington change their game plans to reflect the new reality. If they don’t, perhaps the time has come to field a new team.