Bill and Hillary Clinton were offered their first bribe in 1977.

It was a small, cute bribe.

Call it a beginner bribe if you want. But that’s how you have to start, I guess, in order to build up to more substantial corruption.

Bill was attorney general of Arkansas at the time, and he was offered a very favorable land deal in a development called Saltillo Heights, where Jim McDougal was planning to build houses.

Saltillo Heights was at the time — and still is — in the middle of nowhere — about 35 miles north of Little Rock.

Clinton, according to reporting I did back then, was believed to have made an $8,600 profit in a year after putting down just $400 in cash.

This was one of the deals that was looked into back then by Special Prosecutor Ken Starr.

McDougal died in 1998, so nobody knows what he was expecting in return from the Clintons.

Maybe it was just a developer looking to make friends in high places who could return the favor someday.

And maybe the Clintons did.

McDougal and his wife, Susan, became close to Bill and Hillary. In fact, Susan would later go to prison rather than testify against Bill in another real estate deal that became a lot more famous: Whitewater.

In Whitewater, Bill allegedly pressured an Arkansas banker named David Hale to give Susan an illegal $300,000 loan. That loan was the seed from which the Whitewater controversy grew.

But Saltillo came first.

Bill and Hillary were married two years at the time of that deal, and no public office holder in Arkansas got paid very much. Hey, I get it — a civic leader looking for a little extra on the side.

Bill was always trying to get a little on the side.

Like I said, Jim and Susan would later become friends of Bill and Hillary — as well as partners in that land deal called Whitewater in Pulaski County, Ark.

But that was still a ways into the future. Saltillo Heights, which was in the county next to where Whitewater would be, came first.

I broke the Saltillo story back on June 6, 1996, based on a document I received from someone in Starr’s office.

There was an investigation of the Saltillo Heights deal, as well as many others involving the Clintons, and the document I have appears to have been shown to a grand jury.

But Bill and Hillary never got indicted on Saltillo, or later land deals like Whitewater or Flowerwood Farms — which I’ll get to in upcoming columns.

Some people, I guess, are just lucky.

Hillary, as you’ve probably heard, will very likely be picked later this week as the Democratic Party’s nominee for president.

That, I believe, will turn out to be a big mistake by the Democrats.

Why?

Too many people — including me — know too many bad things about this woman.

So I thought it would be fun today to tell you about the Saltillo deal, one of those bad things that just isn’t going away.

The Democrats will ignore this and everything else at their own peril.

Here’s what I wrote about the Saltillo deal back in ’96: “The Post has learned that a 1977 purchase agreement has surfaced that shows ‘William Clinton’ as the buyer of Tract 74, a 20-acre piece of land at Saltillo Heights, from Jim and Susan McDougal.”

The document I have doesn’t have Bill Clinton’s signature on it. But it does show that this “purchase agreement” was to be delivered to the “Office of the Attorney General, Little Rock, Arkansas” — in other words, Bill Clinton’s office.

The late James (Jim) McDougal, as the seller, signed it.

According to my reporting in 1996 Bill and Hillary agreed to pay $11,000 for the 20-acre Saltillo tract, all but $400 of which was to be borrowed. That comes to $550 an acre.

About a year and a half later, Jim McDougal again had control of that property and sold it to a guy named James W. Mosely for $15,000.

But Mosely only got 15 acres — the other 5 acres had been stripped from the sale.

So the price per acre had jumped to $1,000 an acre.

If the Clintons had actually taken possession of the property and flipped it back to McDougal, they ended up with a tidy profit.

If, for some reason, they balked on the deal, Bill and Hillary were, at least, offered a discounted price in the first place.

Mosely got screwed on the deal, since no houses were ever built.

Back in ’96, Mosely told me that Starr’s office was asking questions.

“The independent counsel kept my original warranty deed and said they’d get in touch with me,” Mosely said.

The Clintons never mentioned the Saltillo transaction, even when they got the chance before a grand jury investigating McDougal.

I guess sometimes you do forget your first time.