It is hard to know exactly who comes out worst from the ongoing Duncan Jenkins-Jen Chang Twitter-threat-mole farrago, at least in the story as told by Jenkins (né Sean Cummins) on his blog, a version of events that awaits a formal response from Liverpool FC while the club conduct their own investigation. Early leaders in the race to the bottom include Chang; Premier League communication officers everywhere; Cummins himself, who played with the bull and got the horns; plus those old perennially tarnished favourites, modern football, the internet and all human beings everywhere.

For those who haven't followed the story, and there cannot be many, Liverpool's director of communications stands accused by the voice behind parody Twitter account Duncan Jenkins of making assorted threats – including a ban from Anfield and the wrath of putative faeces-wielding Liverpool fans – over Cummins's alleged leaking over Twitter of information via "a mole" within the Liverpool dressing room. Cummins claims not to have a mole and has offered chapter and verse on what, if we are to believe his account, were some frankly rather bizarre dealings with Chang.

It is a very modern football story centring as it does on nothing that can sensibly be called football, but instead fraught with the flaring inanities of the periphery. Frankly it's hard to know where to start here, beyond acknowledging that the story as told by Jenkins is in itself a feat of comic self-immolation beyond even NotJenChang or BigJenChang or any one of the many Jen Chang parody accounts that have no doubt already sprung up across this most incontinent of social networks.

Really, though, the wider question is how, exactly, the parody Twitter account – a thing, an entity, a player in itself – has managed to gain such currency not just around, but now apparently inside, professional football. The Jenkins account remains a rare thing: genuinely funny at times as a step up from the simple parody of a named individual. Instead Jenkins poked fun at an entire genre of person, the blog-dufus football hack with his asymmetric haircut, his smartphone, his intrusive matiness, his almost complete lack of talent. Whereas, pre-Jenkins, the simple one-note parody was already a Twitter staple. Some are reliably funny, like fake Big Sam, with its occasionally creative stream of Allardyce-consciousness, or Literally Jamie, a slightly cruel Jamie Redknapp parody which is, incidentally, also rumoured to be on its way out.

For a while last year there was also a popular Andy Townsend turn, which came the closest, pre-Jenkins, to intersecting uncomfortably with the real world. The Townsend account was eventually pulled by Twitter after newspapers, including the Independent, quoted some of its more risqué tweets as evidence of institutionalised sexism in the TV industry.

Beyond this there has long been a subculture of pranks and scams and misinformation, driven by the desire to lampoon both the ambient thirst for footballing gossip and the complicity with which journalists will feed this vice. In the past two years at least two fake football agent feeds have rather sneeringly revealed themselves to be teenagers having a laugh at the expense of tabloid newspapers, where a number of stories "leaked" by these bedroom pranksters have ended up making the news pages. Fingers have been burned and this kind of thing is unlikely to transmit itself quite so easily again.

And Beyond Twitter's blurted misdirections there are broader successes: most notably the fictional Moldovan 16-year-old Masal Bugduv, a player of rare but also sadly nonexistent genius who managed to find his way into a Times list of the top 50 most promising young players in Europe. Plus, who could forget a number of TV channels and newspapers reporting Liverpool's bid to sign Didier Baptiste, fictional full-back with Harchester United of Sky 1's Dream Team? The list goes on, testimony to the chaotic fecundity of an infinite hunger for football gossip and an infinite space in which to put it, not to mention the multiple deadline pressure under which most newspaper hacks work these days: corners will be cut, mistakes will be made, the tide of information will overwhelm.

And perhaps Cummins too must take a little of the blame for the current sui generis shemozzle, which rises up and beyond the simpler parodies that preceded it. If only for the way the Jenkins account began to straddle, uneasily, two opposing genres, no doubt a symptom of his own minor seduction by Twitter-power and journo-heft. It was only when Jenkins began to post "real" things about actual transfers, movements within the club, starting lineups – thereby increasing massively his following and, to a pathetic degree no doubt, his personal wealth via a spoofy internet column – that the current trouble started.

It is easy to portray Chang as someone who simply didn't get the joke. But, to be fair, Chang's beef is not with a parody, but with a parody that stepped out of the shadows, tooled up with a parody-fuelled following, and started having an alarmingly decent punt at actually uncovering some real-world goings-on. This isn't Masal Bugduv lurking always just out of reach – it's Masal Bugduv suddenly turning up at the club gates doing keep-ups and demanding a trial.

On the other hand, nothing Jenkins ever came up with wasn't present elsewhere on the internet. And really it is the structures, the institutional paranoia, the corporate flapping about detailed in his – as yet unexamined – account that are far more alarming, if true, than one man's six-month spell of dressing up in a Batman suit at his keyboard. Whatever its resolution, the Chang-Cummins saga is unlikely to inspire future generations to look upon this one and muse, "truly, they lived though an age of enlightenment ..."

What is beyond dispute is that rumour, speculation and dunder-headed misinformation currently provide an insatiable form of fascination not just around the sport's fevered periphery, a oneupmanship of gossip and lies among those who cling to the coattails of these sporting plcs, but also perhaps among those who report and even control the elite end of the game. Football and the internet make idiots of us all. Strike Duncan Jenkins down and a hundred others will spring up in his place, fallout from a parody of a parody of a parody flushed out into the light in a way that is, in truth, entirely beyond the scope of parody.