The news about the long lines of people holding envelopes of cash at the wedding of the child of a senior Financial Supervisory Service official testifies to the nation’s elite’s ethical standards.

The news reports said that many of the estimated 600 guests at the wedding of the daughter of Cho Young-jae, vice commissioner of the financial watchdog, were executives of financial firms.

The FSS, unlike the regulatory Financial Supervisory Commission, is not a full government agency, but it is entrusted with monitoring, auditing and punishing financial firms. It is so powerful that it, along with the antitrust watchdog the Fair Trade Commission, is referred to as the “economic police.”

So if the same ethics codes for government employees are applied, FSS officials should not inform people they regulate ― the very people who showed up at the wedding of Cho’s daughter ― about their family events or receive gifts exceeding 50,000 won.

Even without such regulations, any sensible person, not least the No. 3 man in the all-powerful FSS, will not take cash envelopes in a manner and scale that can be seen as bribery.

As a matter of fact, government officials who invited people related with their duties to their family events and received cash gifts ranging from 50,000 won to 100,000 won were convicted of graft in recent court rulings.

Cho said that he sent out only a few dozen invitations, most of them to his former and current colleagues at the Bank of Korea and the FSS, but that people whom he did not invite showed up at the wedding and that he felt unable to turn them away.

All this is a lame excuse. Cho must have heard about the increasing number of cases of senior officials and corporate executives who invite only a small number of relatives and friends to family events like weddings and funerals. Cho himself said he did not receive cash when his father-in-law died years ago.

The FSS and relevant authorities will have to determine whether Cho must face discipline. This case should offer a lesson ― or a warning ― to elite members of society who still think of their family events as an opportunity to show off their status and even make some money.