Citizens can air grievances about legislators through letters to editors, posts on favored blogs or even skywriting (if they wish). They can call, write or e-mail that sorry excuse for a representative and give them an ultra-personal piece of their mind.

About the only place citizens cannot call is the Maine Commission on Governmental Ethics and Election Practices. Regular citizens, unless they hold a Legislative seat, can’t file ethics complaints against lawmakers.

It’s an odd policy, this ethical self-policing inside the chummy State House halls. There isn’t currently an alarm about it – only six ethics complaints have been filed against lawmakers within the past decade, and all were found without merit – but the policy remains a glaring loophole.

Allowing citizens to file an ethics complaint about their lawmaker (or anybody else’s) cuts to the core of political integrity. Under today’s policy in Maine, an aggrieved party must convince another member of the exclusive Augusta-based legislative fraternity to file the complaint on their behalf.

This is a tall order, and opens the ethics process to allegations of partisan subversion. The threat of an ethics investigation is a Swiss Army knife in the political toolbox – good for almost every job, like a punitive measure against an enemy, or a way to make friends fast.

The ethics commission can also investigate complaints of its generation, but by pushing such an investigation, the small agency could bite the appropriating hand that feeds it. This is an obvious conflict of interests, the kind the commission should be exposing, not avoiding.

Disallowing public complaints is a unique policy as well. Massachusetts, for example, allows anonymous complaints to its state ethics commission. Even Rhode Island – a state known for its ethics troubles – urges its public to file public complaints.

Today, the commission is scheduled to review draft recommendations from its director, Jonathan Wayne, about changes to ethics laws. Wayne’s No. 1 item is public participation, although he warns this issue “may cause sharp concern with some members of the Legislature.”

It did, when a previous ethics reform effort was stymied. Yet there’s nothing lawmakers should welcome more than becoming more accountable to the public they serve. The first step is shaking off the insulation now afforded to lawmakers.

Maine’s ethics commission started as a regulator of electoral practices, which is a likely reason for its limited scope. Some states have ethics agencies with million-dollar budgets and staff attorneys; but Maine doesn’t need this sprawling, expensive organization.

What it needs is an ethics commission that invites the public into the process.