THERE WAS NOTHING surprising about the recent news that South Carolina’s lottery sales have begun to decline. It’s what we’ve seen happen in state after state after state, across the country. Lottery sales soar when the government gets into the gambling business; then the excitement begins to wane, and sales start to fall.

Nor is there anything troubling about the decline, to those of us who believe people would be better off spending their money on more useful products.

What’s troubling is what comes next in state after state after state: Politicians, having used the manna of free money to create popular new programs that need more funding whether lottery funds are available or not, demand higher sales. So lottery officials roll out ad campaigns that lure desperate people into believing all their troubles will magically disappear if they simply start playing. They offer up ever-more-enticing and -addictive “games,” culminating in video gambling.

The good news is that our legislators were responsible enough to strictly limit the type and amount of advertising the lottery can do, and they prohibited video gambling and other addictive forms of gambling.

The bad news is that legislators can easily lift those restrictions if they get desperate enough. And the spending choices they have made, particularly this year, have laid the groundwork for such desperation.

This spring, when lottery money was still on that normal initial spaceship-like trajectory, lawmakers fell back into the same dangerous habit that had gotten our state into such a mess with the regular budget. Officials had only predicted that the lottery would generate $255 million this year, but legislators had some surplus lottery money left over from last year. So they bought $340 million worth of scholarships, math programs, homework centers, endowed chairs and other goodies.

Lottery officials, who thought the $255 million projection was conservative, are confident that they will be able to generate that much this year, even with the sagging sales. But even if that happens, and the state is able to pay all of its bills this year, there is no way this lottery can generate $340 million next year.

That would have been the case even if lottery sales had continued to increase. What the slow-down means is that next year’s shortfall will be even larger than anyone expected.

When legislators return to work in January, they’ll have to figure out what to do about this. The situation would be bad enough if they had kept their promise to use lottery funding only for new “extras,” such as scholarships. But they haven’t; nearly 5 percent of the state’s general public education funding this year is coming from lottery funds. That money is paying for basic programs that are essential to our state.

The only options are to cut other programs and pay for some of these lottery-funded programs with tax money (as many of them should have been to begin with), to cut some of the lottery-funded programs or to lean on the lottery to produce more money — which means easing the very sensible restrictions we have on how far the state can go in suckering the public.

As unpleasant as the idea of cutting programs is, the thought of lifting lottery restrictions is intolerable.

The task before legislators is not easy: Not only must they make hard choices about which programs to do without; but before they dig our state any deeper into this hole, they also must abandon what is quite literally a lottery mentality, and resolve to start acting responsibly about the way we fund state government.