A CREDIT-RATING agency’s decision to place a negative outlook on Santee Cooper’s bonds lent momentum and even a hint of apparent credibility to the six-year-old effort to strip away any vestige of public accountability over policy decisions at the state-owned utility.

That was a big part of the debate when the Senate passed a bill last month to make it impossible for governors to remove board members unless they break the law, refuse to show up for meetings or meet a limited number of other “causes.”

The change sounds reasonable until you understand what it means: If board members dole money out to legislators’ pet projects, the governor can’t remove them. If they raise rates in order to pay exorbitant salaries, the governor can’t remove them. He can’t even tell them he thinks it would be a good idea if they resigned — and he certainly can’t suggest that they consider whether the state ought to run a power company.

Those restrictions dovetail with two other actions that revived the anti-accountability measure: Board members agreed to trim back their “charitable” contributions and to sell off some excess land, as Gov. Mark Sanford had requested; and the governor orchestrated the hiring of an investment bank that analyzed the possibility of privatizing the utility — an idea that is far less outlandish than proposals to privatize school bus service or to “run government like a business.”

But now that the House is about to take up the bill, another credit agency has reacted the way some senators warned: It has lowered its outlook on Santee Cooper’s bonds to negative, and it has done so precisely because of the bill that was supposed to boost the outlook.

Little wonder.

The legislation guarantees that five of the 11 seats on the board that is ultimately responsible for rates would go to the utility’s biggest customers — the electric cooperatives that buy half of Santee Cooper’s power and a large industrial customer.

Although that’s the main thing Standard and Poor’s found objectionable, the rest of us should be troubled by other parts of the bill.

It sets up an outside screening panel to review the governor’s appointments — an astounding admission by the Senate that it is incapable of vetting these appointees as the law already requires it to do.

It provides “accountability” by letting ratepayers and bondholders hire a lawyer, file a lawsuit and hope that after several years of protracted and expensive legal maneuvering they can convince a judge or a jury that individual board members did something wrong. The threat of that is supposed to somehow do a better job of keeping board members in line than the certain knowledge that a governor can kick them off the board if he doesn’t like the way they run the place.

That’s hard to imagine. What’s easy to imagine — and Santee Cooper executives and board members have said so — is that this lawsuit-happy provision would lead to wholesale resignations by board members, who would be subject to suit if they made the kind of responsible decisions that Mr. Sanford has pushed them to make.

If legislators are determined to make sure that there is no political accountability over the way the state’s most valuable holding is operated, there’s probably nothing we can do at this point to stop them. But they should at least drop the charade: They’re not doing this to protect Santee Cooper from financial ruin. Their actions invite it.