THIS IS A leadership moment.

A tremendous opportunity lies before Gov. Mark Sanford -- a chance to change everything. A chance to help us get off our haunches and move forward, so that our state is no longer last where it wants to be first, and first where it wants to be last. A chance to make life in South Carolina everything that it should be, and that the citizens of our beautiful state deserve for it to be.

It may not seem so. We're in the dog days of August. What news there is either comes to us from far away, or is monotonous, or depressing, or both. Take, for instance, the long-delayed lawsuit by poor school districts claiming that the state doesn't meet its obligation to fund them. Just more of the same sad story.

And yet there lies our opportunity.

Not in the lawsuit itself. Such things are not best settled in courts. Should the districts "win," with the court ordering the state to address the problem, we'll still be back where we were, with the political branches having to figure out how to get the job done. And if the districts lose -- well, I hardly want to think about that. If the court decides the state is right, that it is doing what it must to provide a "minimally adequate education," opponents of right action will seize upon it as proof that their inertia is justified, and nothing needs to be done. And that would be disastrous.

The biggest public policy issue in South Carolina is education. And the education issue, properly understood, is about our failure to provide equality of opportunity for all of our children to realize their potential. Contrary to what some people believe, we do know how to do schools in South Carolina. We have some excellent ones -- in our affluent suburbs. It's out in the sleepy hamlets and fields where our traditional roots lie, the places that the new economy has forgotten, that levels of educational attainment lag so far behind as to pull down the overall averages. And that makes the whole state look -- to us and to outsiders -- like a place that no one would want to invest in, and which the best and the brightest will escape at the first opportunity.

So instead of standing by and watching this lawsuit be tried, we need to get busy doing what we should have done long ago: Fix the problem.

That may seem tough to do, what with our state's finances being in such a mess. But in fact, that mess is in itself an opportunity. In fact, it is one of a number of elements that come together to provide us with the aforementioned leadership moment. Here are some of those elements:

- The lawsuit itself, which is highlighting in detail the school problem (as if we didn't already know about it).

- The legislative tax study committee, which is even now examining how to overhaul the way we finance state government.

- The governor's ongoing budget hearings, in which he is challenging a lot of the most fundamental assumptions regarding what our taxes pay for and how we order our priorities.

- A vast restructuring of state government, one of the governor's top goals, that is set to be at the top of the legislative agenda when lawmakers return at the first of the year. This restructuring would, among other things, put the state's portion of school administration directly under the governor for the first time.

- The governor's emphasis on raising the average household incomes of South Carolinians.

All of these things are inextricably tied together. You can't improve education without addressing equality of opportunity. You can't raise household incomes without raising the levels of educational attainment. You can't finance any of it without trashing our dysfunctional tax structure and starting over. You'll never raise enough money, even with a revamped tax structure, without rethinking the rest of government and making it more efficient and effective. And with half of the state's resources going to schools already, it's hard to imagine us making much more progress without making education the direct responsibility of the governor.

That last bit is not to say that progress has not been made under the current system. During the tenure of state Superintendent Inez Tenenbaum, schoolchildren have been doing demonstrably better in a variety of ways. Of course, all that has been threatened by the current funding cutbacks, and Mrs. Tenenbaum has shown great political courage in telling lawmakers in no uncertain terms that we cannot and must not slide backwards.

But the pulpit of a separately elected superintendent of education will never be bully enough to overcome the forces of resistance.

A job like this calls for a governor. The Legislature is made up of 170 people with competing aims, and many of its most powerful members come from districts that provide them with little motivation to help the poorest parts of the state catch up.

It has to be the governor. And in many ways, this leadership moment was made for Mark Sanford. He doesn't mind taking political risks. He delights in shaking things up. He is passionate about improving our economy. He has the ability to see how all of it -- schools, taxes, restructuring, economic development -- fit together.

What he needs to do -- what we, the people of South Carolina, need him to do -- is sketch a vision for addressing it all, and then paint that vision in colors bright enough to overcome any remaining tendency of lawmakers to cling to gray stagnation.

In the next few months, he has a narrow window in which to act, in which to pull together the various elements of this opportunity into a coherent whole. He must do so.