Maine government has an ethics emergency.

Well, emergency ethics legislation, at least.

The somewhat stingy Legislative Council has approved fresh ethics reform legislation, submitted by House Speaker Glenn Cummings, D-Portland, for the January session. It replaces a bill, LD 1008, that was drowned in the political bathtub by the Legal and Veterans Affairs Committee in May.

This predecessor emerged from the Presiding Officers Advisory Committee on Legislative Ethics, which spent 2006 cobbling ethics reforms after the conflict-of-interest uproar around Rep. Tom Saviello, a Wilton independent.

Yet, despite this work and strong support from leadership (Cummings and Senate President Beth Edmonds co-sponsored the original legislation) the bill ran out of steam. Then it ran out of time.

Then Legal and Veterans Affairs laid it to rest.

Afterward, the committee’s Senate chairperson, Sen. Lisa Marraché, D-Waterville, said the reforms lacked “facts.” The committee, amazingly, decided the history of ethics complaints needed study before moving ahead.

Reform’s resounding thud is a crystalline example of invisible intestinal fortitude – nobody in the Legislature had guts enough to support the reforms, aside from a late effort by Cummings, and they were scuttled.

It deserved better. Recommendations included allowing the public to lodge ethics complaints about lawmakers, bringing ethical complaint proceedings into the open and broadening definitions of “conflict of interest” to reflect the realities of our modern citizen Legislature.

These remain. This new iteration also includes contribution limits to political action committees, more financial reporting dates for candidates, greater oversight of ethics commissioners and an online registry of lobbyists and their clients.

The bill also includes prohibition of candidates – or their spouses – from serving as campaign treasurers or deputy treasurers, a loophole exposed during the 2006 gubernatorial campaign of Barbara Merrill.

All of these changes make great sense.

What doesn’t make sense was how ethics reform was treated like Kryptonite the first time around. Kudos to Cummings for forcing the issue – again, and to Edmonds for taking a bullish stance on revisiting this legislation.

“I’m going to change the culture around this ethics discussion,” she said during a recent editorial board meeting at the Sun Journal. She voiced support for a new internal legislative ethics committee, empaneled as a kind of kangaroo court to evaluate potential conflicts of interest regarding elected officials.

Edmonds also supports expanding financial disclosures for lawmakers, which she says are “rudimentary at best.”

These are noble intentions as well.

But just like the last legislative session, ethics could be overshadowed by bigger, sexier issues – consolidation of county jails and transportation funding are the likely January headliners. It’s a re-election year, as well.

This time, leadership cannot push ethics reform and expect to keep moving. They must see it through, as it would be shameful for these sensible, needed reforms to fail again.

Then we’d have a real ethics emergency on our hands.