We were eight or nine years old and returning home from shopping, riding in the back of our station wagon, when my sister offered me some gum. As I reached for the stick of Doublemint, it dawned on me that something was amiss: We never had gum at our house, and my sister didn’t have any money of her own.

Alone with my thoughts, gum squishing between my teeth, it was just a matter of seconds before I solved the mystery and set my trap.

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“Where,” I asked in a loud, imperious voice easy to hear up in the car’s front seat, “did you get that gum?”

My theatrics had the desired impact, pulling my mother and father into the conversation, and all eyes turned to my cornered and now-frantic sister.

She didn’t answer verbally, but the blubbering flood of tears pointed to the obvious conclusion: She snitched it from the store we had just visited.

Now, in our house, you could get away with a few things, but if you were caught lying or stealing, you were toast.

And as my sister wailed and flailed, my parents slammed on the brakes, drove back to the store, yanked us all from the back seat and lined us up at the store’s counter, and made my sister admit what she had done as they paid for what was left of the pack of gum.

I’ve never forgotten that day, and I hope I never do, because then and there I learned the price for stealing was swift restitution, public embarrassment and untold private agony.

A stick of gum from the grocery store. A pack of Post-It notes from the office. An unearned $20 in change from a distracted cashier. A $1,000 error in our favor on a bank statement. A $100,000 under-appraisal from our country’s residential taxing authorities. $20 million in stock options or bonuses from a sinking public company.

Somewhere in the preceding paragraph, each of us should be able to draw a line that we won’t cross – the absolute line between right and wrong.

But where should it go?

What’s frustrating is that I know the difference between right and wrong, and I know where the line should be drawn. But the pencil and eraser I keep in my back pocket make it a moving line, a line that over the years has become a sort of floating gray zone of marks and erasures on the paper of life. And as my personal needs and situations have changed through the years, the line has moved right along with them.

The now-vilified executives at Enron, ImClone, Merck and others obviously faced this same question, and we can plainly see the line they drew wasn’t very straight.

Did they start with a pack of gum and some Post-It notes, too?