We’re happy to give our qualified support to creation of McCombie’s State Ethics Task Force, provided that it is a truly bipartisan effort to ferret out smart reforms that will curtail corruption in a state infamous for it. If, however, it turns out to be merely a vehicle to score political points with voters, we’ll take a pass. So should lawmakers.

We worry that will be the case, given the partisan reaction to the plan by McCombie, R-Savanna, to introduce a bill creating the panel. It doesn’t, for example, help the optics that the ethics concerns she outlined focused on only the most recent investigations involving lawmakers, all of them Democrats.

It also doesn’t help the optics that McCombie chairs the House Republican Organization, where her primary duty is to get Republicans elected to the overwhelmingly Democratic House.

So the lukewarm reaction to McCombie’s announcement by the hyper-partisan spokesman for hyper-partisan House Speaker Michael Madigan, D-Chicago, was hardly surprising. Steve Brown declined to address the task force because he had not seen the legislation yet, Capitol News Illlinois reported. But he was quick to note that Republicans  have their share of ethical misdeeds. He’s right. Don’t forget, the Illinois GOP is well represented among the scandalous number of governors who have been investigated or served time in prison.

There is, however, no doubt that McCombie was right when she said, “To have the public’s trust, we must take action whenever confidence is broken. We’ve seen the headlines of the FBI’s recent activity, including raiding the homes of legislators, lobbyists, and offices within the state Capitol. The cost of corruption is too high for Illinoisans to ignore."

And yet legislative leaders and rank-and-file lawmakers usually do just that. They remain satisfied with nibbling around the edges even as bad actors and lax policies enable so-called public servants to enrich themselves at the expense of the public.

Take the much-ballyhooed State Officials and Employees Ethics Act, which was signed into law in 2003 by then-Gov. Rod Blagojevich. The Chicago Democrat initially amendatorily vetoed parts of the bills that included a new office of legislative inspector general and the Legislative Ethics Commission because the reform effort didn’t go far enough. Ironically, Blagojevich, who’s known these days as prisoner No. 40892-424, was right.

In November 2017, Illinoisans discovered just how little lawmakers care about policing themselves when it was revealed that the inspector general’s office had been vacant since 2014. Making matters worse is that there was no immediate move to fix the oversight by legislative leaders or the eight lawmakers on the Legislative Ethics Commission created to rule on its inspector general’s findings.

Nothing would have happened, we fear, if a group of courageous women in government hadn’t drawn attention to the issue when they brought the powerful Me Too movement to Springfield.

But once again, lawmakers acted only when they were forced to, and once again, they fell short. While they did strengthen the office of legislative inspector general, they fell short of providing this crucial watchdog with the powers required to do the job effectively.

Still missing, for example, is broad power to initiate subpoenas and authority to convene grand juries. Perhaps worst of all, the General Assembly has not moved to ensure the legislative inspector general is truly independent and not just a servant of the commission it answers to, and by extension, the legislative body the inspector is charged with policing.

Quickly addressing such clear and obvious needs is a good way to launch a serous effort. If lawmakers find ways to clean up their own House first using such low-hanging fruit, it will give them the credibility they need to demand broader ethics rules and implement real punishment that will deter officials from profiting from government service in the future.

Whatever lawmakers do next, however, they would be wise to keep this in mind:

Long-suffering Illinois voters are not likely to be fooled yet again by "reform" efforts that are little more than election-year window-dressing. So if lawmakers do launch yet another reform effort, make sure that this time it matters.