What we can learn here

Ignorance of the law is no excuse. That’s unless you happen to be a journeyman pizza vendor holding the mostly pointless office of lieutenant governor of Arkansas.

Then ignorance of the law almost seems to befit the job.

The only substantial role of the lieutenant governor is to become governor if something tragic should befall the real one.

Thus its main current effect is to keep the religious among you on your knees in prayer for Mike Beebe’s next heartbeat. Otherwise, the unethical and unqualified Mark Darr, the one excusing himself by ignorance, would become governor.

Think of the damage his ignorance of the law could inflict then.

There are couple of instructive elements to this business of the state Ethics Commission staff ’s preliminary assertion last week that Darr violated ethics laws by tapping more than $40,000 of campaign money for personal costs.

That’s not to mention the audit finding a week before that Darr had tapped the taxpayers for more than $12,000 in personal costs, which is not to mention Darr’s defense that these were mere procedural hiccups caused by his not knowing better.

The first instructive element is that, though the existence of the lieutenant’s office is silly, voters should be more careful about whom they elect.

Darr got elected in 2010, quite narrowly over Democrat Shane Broadway, merely because he was the Republican in a year of Republican insurgence.

He made a television commercial in which he said he would go to Little Rock and stop Obamacare. He found out in office that all he could do in the way of keeping that vow was join individually, as a brief-filing friend of the court, a Missouri appeal of the individual mandate.

Long story short: The individual mandate got upheld by the U.S. Supreme Court, and Darr went driving down the highway using gasoline paid for by his previous year’s campaign.

Broadway is a veteran and able politico, having served as speaker of the House and state senator, and as a thoroughly competent director of the state Higher Education Department.

His skills would have been wasted in the inane office of lieutenant governor, except that his conceivable ascendance to the governorship would be less a matter of public panic than Darr’s.

Broadway’s main weakness is that he can be a bit ponderous in his command of detail, such as what the law says on the matter of using campaign money for personal purposes.

That brings us to the second instructive element.

It’s in the matter of real ethics, which is doing the right thing when no one is watching. It’s erring on the side of caution when the right thing is uncertain.

It’s living by this motto: When in doubt, don’t.

Darr was cutting corners. He had lent his campaign personal money in 2010. Then, in office, he was in the process of trying to raise money to retire that campaign debt to himself.

When he needed gasoline, or Razorback tickets, he charged it all to the campaign on the justification that it was his money anyway.

He should have known a conscientious truth that most of us surely would have grasped instinctively.

It is that he was rationalizing. It is that he should raise his payback separately and not commingle today’s charges at the quick-stop in Ola with last year’s campaign.

It turns out that Darr may have tapped the campaign fund for more than it owed him. Who couldn’t see that coming?

None of that is as egregious, or as corrupt, as getting payola in a pie or collecting campaign contributions for an unopposed race and using some of the money to put an entertainment system in your home.

But it’s quintessentially unethical. It is textbook unethical.

The question now is whether Darr should resign. I’ve concluded not.

The lieutenant governor’s office is not worth the trouble of a special election, especially this close to a general election.

I’m ready to roll the dice that Beebe stays healthy, and that, even if a tragedy should put Darr in the governor’s office, he would not have the time or opportunity by January 2015 to do irreparable harm.

I would request, though, that Beebe submit to a full physical examination and stay inside the Governor’s Mansion for the duration of his term.

Finally, I repeat my request that the Legislature refer to voters a constitutional amendment to abolish the office of lieutenant governor and provide that the attorney general, who has real day-to-day work providing worthy training, ascend in the event of a gubernatorial vacancy.