In her ongoing humiliation over public investigation into her semi private life, Mayor Sheila Dixon has invoked a few uncomfortable buzzwords: racism and sexism. She says they’re the roots of the state prosecutor’s probe.

If she’s right, then thousands will stand with her and cry foul.

But if she’s wrong, she muddies the waters in which all residents of her city must swim without instinctively invoking such language and thinking the worst of each other.

In an interview with the Afro-American newspaper, Dixon was asked whether she had been treated unfairly by the state. She replied, “I think there is sexism and racism.” The allegation has now been picked up and bandied about by other news organizations.

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Dixon said this in the aftermath of state investigators barging into her house early one recent morning, with her two children, Joshua and Jasmine, still sleeping and the kids already “beside themselves,” as Dixon told the newspaper.

What complicates the state prosecutor’s investigation is this: It is not just a criminal probe, but one laced with human intimacy. The mayor of Baltimore is a single woman, around whom it has always been America’s (at least male America’s) favorite preoccupation to gossip. In that sense, yes, sexism abides — but it’s not the prosecutor’s, it’s everybody’s.

Dixon is an attractive woman, and she was involved with a man, developer Ronald Lipscomb, whose history is complicated. There is his professional relationship with City Hall, as one whose business involves government approval (and money) to develop municipal property (and thus make lots more money.)

And there is also Lipscomb’s off-and-on marital relationship, as described by Dixon attorney Dale Kelberman in the same Afro-American article: “She disclosed that she had a relationship with Mr. Lipscomb for a few months in the end of 2003 and the beginning of 2004 while they were both separated from their spouses. They’re mature adults, they’re allowed to date and go out with each other and they traveled together and exchanged gifts and that’s all there is to it.”

Well, not quite — but it’s a start.

You have a woman, Dixon, who was then president of the Baltimore City Council. You have Lipscomb taking her out of town and buying her gifts, such as shoes and furs. You also have Dixon paying for certain items, such as a hotel room.

The city’s Code of Ethics is clear about such matters: Financial disclosure forms must be filed for “any gift with a value of more than $50” from any person doing business with the city.

“The law is clear,” one city judge said the other day, “and every public official in town knows it.”

Lipscomb was clearly doing business with the city, but wishes to make a legalistic distinction: His business, Doracon, operated as a “subcontractor,” not a “contractor” — thus freeing Dixon from the need to disclose any gifts from Lipscomb, she says. Try making that distinction to a jury.

So here’s another perspective: Lipscomb’s company gets to make tons of money in city contracts — and all Dixon gets is a shopping spree in furs and shoes?

“The amount they’re talking about here,” says one law enforcement official familiar with the investigation, “is not big at all. They’re not saying Dixon took hundreds of thousands of dollars. They’re talking about small amounts. It’s something that would be really stupid of her if it was really a quid pro quo.”

That’s what makes this so tricky: To trace the money, you have to follow the intimacy. But, if the story’s about intimacy, then what makes it anybody’s business but Dixon and Lipscomb’s?

Yes, she received more than $50 in gifts and, yes, the Code of Ethics is clear about reporting such sums. But, were the gifts a reflection of city business, or business of the heart?

If you’re in the midst of a romantic relationship, and you report the gifts as required by the Code of Ethics, maybe your concern isn’t about somebody uncovering an unhealthy financial quid pro quo — it’s about somebody finding out Dixon, a woman with political ambition, had a relationship with a man whose marital status was, shall we say, in flux at that time.

That Lipscomb spent money on Dixon, there is no doubt. That she failed to report it, there is no doubt. That it involved a direct trade-off, a few gifts for considerable city business, there is plenty of doubt. And that distinction — having to report private, romantic gifts in public files — might be a tricky thing for prosecutors to explain.