Will the so-called ComEd Four actually ever see any prison time? For that matter, will former House Speaker Michael Madigan, who just had his pending corruption trial delayed by six months?

Those are now real questions as we await the U.S. Supreme Court’s verdict on whether federal prosecutors have been overly aggressive in taking down the likes of Madigan and former Ald. Ed Burke.

No, the high court isn’t weighing in directly on Madigan or former ComEd CEO Anne Pramaggiore and three others who were convicted last spring of bribing the once-all-powerful speaker through an elaborate system of favors, including hiring Madigan cronies for lobbying jobs requiring little or no work. But it might as well be.

Sentencing for the four, originally scheduled for this month, has been delayed until late next month and probably will be set back further. U.S. District Judge John Robert Blakey, overseeing Madigan’s upcoming trial, determined as much when he reluctantly agreed with Madigan’s lawyers to delay the trial to wait for the decision in an appeal brought by a former northwest Indiana mayor. “It’s better to do it right than to do it twice,” he said.

The reason: The Supreme Court will rule on a criminal case involving former Portage, Indiana, Mayor James Snyder, who was convicted of tax and corruption charges. That case comes out of the federal court system’s 7th Circuit, which includes Chicago and all of Illinois. The result will weigh heavily on the fates of the ComEd Four defendants and Madigan.

It’s worth briefly summarizing the Snyder case. As mayor, Snyder took great pains to ensure a specific company got a city contract for new garbage trucks. That company then hired Snyder as a consultant for $13,000 — an arrangement in which there was no evidence Snyder did any work. Prosecutors charged Snyder with corruptly accepting a cash gratuity in return for steering the contract to the firm.

Snyder’s defense attorneys argued the evidence showed no explicit quid pro quo. They warned that convicting public officials in the absence of a stated corrupt arrangement risks criminalizing simple favors like buying a case of wine for an official after winning public business or getting a law passed.

The Snyder case is interesting because the facts demonstrate about as clearly as possible the presence of corruption without an explicitly stated underhanded bargain. Most observers, we believe, would look at those facts and conclude that, yes, that kind of behavior is corrupt and should be illegal.

Likewise, in the ComEd Four case, most reviewing the evidence would view as blatantly corrupt the sometimes-frantic steps Pramaggiore and company lobbyists took over many years to keep in Madigan’s good graces as he helped push through state legislation that meant billions for ComEd and its parent, Exelon.

The Snyder case doesn’t bear as directly on Burke’s conviction, which involves a different statute. So the former aldermanic powerhouse, who recently turned 80, has less hope of avoiding jail time thanks to decisions yet to be rendered in Washington.

In the cases of both Madigan and Burke, regardless of the ultimate legal outcomes, the feds have done a great public service in ridding the city and state of political heavyweights who acted as gatekeepers on critically important public policy issues while they arguably tied many of those matters to their own private interests.

Still, it won’t be a surprise, given how the Supreme Court has ruled recently in other public corruption cases around the country, if the justices’ decision in Snyder significantly undermines the ComEd Four convictions. Scott Lassar, Pramaggiore’s attorney and the former chief federal prosecutor for the Northern District of Illinois, has said publicly that he expects the outcome to mean at the very least a new trial and possibly a reversal of the convictions.

We won’t know until probably in June, when the justices tend to issue opinions in major cases.

We certainly want to see justice done in the case of Madigan, whose Springfield political machine was a cancer on Illinois’ body politic. But we’re at least as concerned with how the Snyder ruling affects future FBI and prosecutorial efforts in a city and state that have more than earned their reputations as cesspools of corruption.

The high court, through its past rulings in this area, seems very disturbed by what it views as prosecutorial overreach, particularly when it comes to policing the behavior of public officials. Fair enough. There’s room for debate on that subject.

But if an explicit quid pro quo or the classic stack of bills in a brown bag ends up being what’s required to prove that a public official is acting corruptly, the justices risk going too far in tying the hands of federal law enforcement and prosecutors. That would be a terrible result for a state that only now, with the falls from grace of Madigan and Burke, is showing some signs of getting past its notorious and frankly justified image.

The other risk is that the high court unintentionally provides the corruption-prone with a road map on how to get away with behavior like the sleazy arrangement ComEd had with Madigan over nearly a decade. There was no need for foolish “if you do that, then I will do this” statements in the hours of wiretaps that otherwise amply demonstrated the individuals involved knew precisely why they were doing back flips to please Madigan. The absence of such cluelessness didn’t change the truth of what was happening, which was blatant.

We can look at those facts and assert this without equivocation: If that’s not illegal, then (as they used to say) there oughta be a law. If the Snyder ruling ends up undermining the public corruption fight seriously enough, our congressional delegation should seek to make federal law clearer. Unfortunately, expecting Congress to act these days, even when an issue cries out for a response, is naive.

In light of that, we call on the justices to keep our state in mind as they determine Snyder’s fate.