JUST WHEN YOU thought silly season was over, upstart Thomas Ravenel gets elected state treasurer, and suddenly we learn that state law requires the treasurer to be at his desk six days a week.

Clearly, it’s an outdated law that might have made sense at some point in the long-ago past but certainly hasn’t in, oh, decades (centuries?). But Mr. Ravenel’s arch-nemesis, Board of Economic Advisors chairman John Rainey, declares that if Mr. Ravenel takes his oath to uphold the laws, he is obliged to obey this one.

Well yes. And no.

This is a really stupid law that lawmakers haven’t bothered repealing because if they tried to abolish all the stupid laws, they wouldn’t have time to fight over such crucial matters as what the state’s Official Late Thursday Afternoon Fried Salty Snack Food should be.

Really stupid laws need to be repealed, and sometimes it takes silly confrontations such as the one that appears to be brewing to jolt the Legislature into action.

But elected officials, even more than the rest of us, have an obligation to obey the laws — even stupid ones.

Still, even given that greater obligation, laws should be applied with at least a modicum of uniformity.

That brings us to Section 8-11-10 of the S.C. Code: “The departments of the state government except where seven day per week services are maintained, shall remain open from nine A.M. until five P.M. from Monday through Friday.... On Saturdays such departments may close at one P.M.”

The law provides one exception to the Saturday mandate, and it is a truly bizarre one: the Department of Motor Vehicles. There probably is no agency whose Saturday morning operation would convenience more of the public. Fortunately, that agency recently realized that, and decided on its own to open on Saturdays.

Unlike the treasurer’s law, the broader Saturday mandate does not specifically require any one individual to be at work on a given Saturday. But it does require that “each employee shall work not less than one Saturday out of each month.”

So if Mr. Ravenel must sit at his desk in the Wade Hampton Office Building every Saturday morning, then presumably the governor, the education superintendent, the Corrections director and everybody else who runs a state agency is obliged to sit at his or her desk at least one Saturday per month. And the agencies they oversee must be open for business, every Saturday.

As much as we believe in obeying the law, we can’t see shelling out the money it would take just to turn on all the lights and heat up the buildings across state government — much less justify the disruption in employees’ lives — in service to a long-forgotten law. And if we’re not going to ask every state employee to obey such laws, we can’t see asking just Mr. Ravenel to do so.

When the Legislature convenes in January, it could abolish both laws in less than two weeks. And it should.