IF THERE IS ONE thing about which Gov. Mark Sanford is completely right, it’s the need to overhaul our state’s 19th-century government and give the state’s top elected official the tools to carry out the agenda on which he is elected.

What has been disappointing is that he has not been as willing to spend political capital on this crucial idea as he has on less essential (and less worthy) ideas. So it was encouraging to see government restructuring front and center when Mr. Sanford rolled out his five priorities for the coming legislative session.

The governor has scaled back his proposal from his first two times out. Instead of asking that nearly all of the executive branch of government be placed under the state’s chief executive, where it belongs, Mr. Sanford now requests simply that the governor control a central administrative agency and a more rationally ordered grouping of health and social services agencies, and that the public elect four independent statewide officials instead of dividing the government among nine independently elected executives.

In a reasonable world, it shouldn’t be necessary to back off the larger goal of making most state agencies accountable to the governor, as is the case in nearly all other states. But Mr. Sanford hopes the change will make his proposals more palatable to a General Assembly whose resistance has much more to do with appearances than with reality.

Legislators who oppose government restructuring usually say it’s dangerous to transfer so much authority from the Legislature to the governor.

But the fact is that the Legislature would lose practically nothing under Mr. Sanford’s plan.

Agencies that aren’t controlled by the governor aren’t controlled by the Legislature either. They’re controlled either by down-the-ballot constitutional officers whose names most South Carolinians wouldn’t recognize, or else by part-time, appointed boards, whose members often can’t be replaced as priorities change.

This flies in the face of the very idea of self-governance. When 100 or so separate state agencies are run by people who can’t be held accountable by the public or by any elected officials, then the people are no longer in charge of their government.

In addition, such a system works against the efficient delivery of state services. When state agencies are controlled by so many different independent boards and elected officials, those agencies don’t cooperate unless their autonomous bosses happen to hire people who, on their own, decide to go beyond their job descriptions and reach out to other agencies to solve our state’s problems. More often, agency directors don’t take those extraordinary steps, because there’s more incentive to duplicate services and sometimes even work at cross-purposes with the rest of the government. What matters in such a system isn’t what’s best for our state; what matters is what’s best for a particular agency.

Mr. Sanford seems to understand this better than any chief executive we’ve seen. He also understands how much the duplication and the absence of cooperation and accountability cost the state — in terms of either substandard service or higher taxes.

His grasp of the problem and support for a solution is perhaps the most attractive thing about Gov. Sanford. It’s a quality he should capitalize on, by making this the idea he’s willing to go to the mat over.