THANKS ARE DUE to Gov. Mark Sanford and his staff for taking the lead while other state officials diddled over getting campaign contribution information on the Internet and easily accessible to all South Carolinians.

Mr. Sanford had already pushed this issue to the forefront by including funding for an online reporting system in his executive budget for this year. But when the State Ethics Commission said there was simply no way to get such a system operating in time for the 2006 elections, the governor took to heart our objection that there was no reason some sort of quick-and-dirty system couldn’t be up and running this year.

What the governor came up with apparently will be much more than we had expected. When his staff found out that the local affiliate of a national e-commerce business already had a contract to retool state agencies’ Web sites, they worked out a plan for that company, South Carolina Interactive, to tackle campaign finance reports. Company officials told The Associated Press they can have the system operating by January.

We won’t know until we see it whether this database will do everything that’s needed, or whether it will simply work as a stopgap until the Ethics Commission is able to contract with someone for a more fully functional interface. But even if it turns out not to be the top-of-the-line system with all the bells and whistles that officials can dream up, the idea of saving the $318,000 the state had expected to spend to get a system built certainly is nothing to sneeze at. And we are encouraged by the fact that the company’s parent, NIC, provides database service for several states and the Federal Election Commission.

The prospect of having an online reporting system in place in time to capture the bulk of the contributions and expenditures for next year’s elections should be extremely welcome news to anyone who cares about how government operates. Spending on elections at all levels is skyrocketing, and few newspapers provide the levelof reporting on the subject that many voters would find useful. (It never has been “sexy” enough to make much of a splash on TV or radio.) The result has been that people who want to make fully informed decisions about their choices at election time are increasingly on their own, or at the mercy of competing campaigns, which obviously have little incentive to report straightforward information. Putting that public information on the Internet allows people to find out as much as they want to know about who candidates may be most indebted to, as well as about how they’re spending their money.

It shouldn’t be extraordinary that a governor would get involved in such a situation. After all, the governor is supposed to be in charge of making sure that the laws the Legislature passes are implemented. But in South Carolina, the governor’s power to do that is extremely limited. In fact, there’s nothing that requires the State Ethics Commission to agree to this arrangement. But we see absolutely no justification for it not to do so, and so we look forward to seeing our state move out of the national cellar on public disclosure in the very near future.