ABOUT THOSE 106 vetoes: The whole dialogue descended so rapidly from the governor’s veto message delivered at midnight — the House rushing through to override all but one in 90 minutes, the governor hauling in the piglets to denounce the House, the Senate overriding most of the rest on the day of the pigs — that there was little opportunity to discuss the merits of the vetoes themselves.

Yet a month later, the whole ugly episode still resonates with the public, and it still ruffles legislators. It is likely to continue to have repercussions at the polls, which in turn could have repercussions in the House leadership.

So before we go any further, let’s take a few moments to review what Gov. Mark Sanford actually did with the budget bill.

Mr. Sanford has characterized his vetoes as an assault on pork; that’s an overstatement. Likewise, legislators’ view of it as an assault on the Legislature is over the top.

The vetoes fall into four broad categories. The biggest problem with the Legislature’s response was its refusal to acknowledge the four different types of vetoes and to treat them accordingly. Had they done so, lawmakers still could have handled the vetoes quickly, but would not have been open to the valid charge that they refused even to consider the governor’s arguments:

• The first 51 vetoes targeted individual spending items. This is where Mr. Sanford deleted what pork he could find: six instances of “flow-through” or earmarked funding, where the Legislature directed an agency to spend money on a particular program, even if the agency determined a different program is more valuable.

The earmark we all know about is $380,000 for a bowl game in Charleston. Other earmarks are less clearly wrong — $175,000 for a health care access program at the Lancaster-Kershaw Health Center, for example, and $18,000 for a job-training program run by the Greenville Urban League.

Beyond the earmarks, Mr. Sanford vetoed funding for new college programs that hadn’t been approved by the Commission on Higher Education, beach renourishment and, in a couple of instances, money the agencies themselves said they didn’t need.

But while the governor gave a justification for each veto, he made a point of saying the reason he struck these 51 lines was not so much because he was offended by the individual items but because he believed the state constitution required that he trim $16 million from the budget.

• Nine vetoes were designed to protect specific agencies from budget cuts if last year’s projected surplus is not as large as expected. The Legislature had set aside a handful of agencies to receive their full share of funding even if the surplus came up short, but others would receive only a portion of their funding. Mr. Sanford tried to move nine agencies, including the Corrections Department and the judiciary, from the list of agencies that would receive only partial funding to the list that would receive complete funding no matter what.

• Similarly, 18 vetoes sought to protect a handful of vital agencies in the event that the Revenue Department collects less than $90 million in back taxes. Mr. Sanford tried to whittle down the list of agencies that would share in that money, because it is to be distributed proportionately if less than $90 million is collected. Shorten the list, and there’s a greater chance that everybody still on it gets what’s promised.

• The final group of 28 vetoes is less a group than “everything else.” These are the provisos, or directions to agencies. They have the effect of state law. Among them were items that prohibit the state from reducing Medicaid payments to pharmacies or ambulance providers, allow some early retirement incentives for political employees who can be fired at will and require a study before the Corrections Department privatizes medical services.

This group is distinctly, measurably different from the first three. These were the vetoes that deserved far more attention than the House gave them, if for no other reason than the fact that they could not be folded neatly into an all-purpose group.

In the case of the first 51 vetoes, Mr. Sanford made a reasonable argument about the constitution, but the language of the constitution also leaves room to justify the Legislature’s position that its plan to pay off a two-year-old deficit next year meets the requirement. Since the governor’s argument for all 51 vetoes was the need to comply with the constitution, it wasn’t unreasonable for the Legislature, having rejected his constitutional analysis, to summarily reject those 51 vetoes.

Likewise, the next two groups of vetoes boiled down to whether to believe the projections about available funding. It was reasonable for Mr. Sanford to question the estimates and, having done so, to try to protect vital services. But it was not unreasonable for the Legislature to remain confident that the money would come in and, thus, to reject all of those vetoes wholesale.

Mr. Sanford’s vetoes were reasonable, consistent and by no means an attack on the Legislature. They deserved better than the backs of lawmakers’ hands. If people want to throw out the incumbents because they have no respect for the governor and they don’t do enough to work with him, that’s fine. If they want to kick out incumbents for failing to prioritize state needs, that’s fine.

But it would be wrong to kick legislators out because of some belief that by overriding his budget vetoes, our pork-happy Legislature refused to have its wild spending reined in. That’s not what happened here.

Ms. Scoppe can be reached at cscoppe@thestate.com or at (803) 771-8571.