A GOVERNMENT HAS no more essential obligation than to provide for the public safety. But our state has fallen dangerously far behind in this area in recent years — slashing the number of Highway Patrol troopers even as traffic increased on our highways, slashing the number of correctional officers even as our prison population skyrocketed and reducing funding to the State Law Enforcement Division even as it had to take on the added duties that came in the wake of 9/11.

Our escalating highway death rate can be tied directly to the dearth of troopers, as drivers speed down the highways blissfully aware that their chances of getting caught are about as great as their chances of winning the lottery. And while we’ve dodged a bullet elsewhere, it’s only a matter of time before our skimping has equally deadly — and likely more dramatic — consequences in our overcrowded prisons and our outgunned state police force.

And so Gov. Mark Sanford’s proposal to hire hundreds more troopers, prison guards and SLED agents and to buy new police cruisers, metal detectors and other equipment is welcome, and long overdue, news.

We believe there is room for debate about some of the governor’s specific allocations: It’s probably just as important to increase pay as to increase the total number of troopers and prison guards, for instance, since low pay has lead to extraordinary turnover rates that threaten the public safety every bit as much as the low numbers; and we’re not sure the Department of Natural Resources falls into the same hyper-critical category as the Highway Patrol, SLED and adult and juvenile prisons.

But Mr. Sanford is indisputably correct when he calls law enforcement “one of those core functions” of government, which must be provided for “with excellence.” As we have been saying for several years now, our state’s leaders — the governor and the General Assembly — simply must find a way to provide enough troopers and SLED agents and correctional officers to keep our streets, our communities and, yes, our prisons safe.

That doesn’t mean, however, that our state’s leaders should have a free hand to pay for these crucial services, because public safety is not the only essential obligation of government. We would gain nothing, for instance, by paying for more public safety personnel by stripping $50 million from the Department of Mental Health, and leaving even more dangerously mentally ill patients untreated.

So we really can’t evaluate a proposal to beef up our law enforcement efforts until we see what we’re giving up in order to do it. In Mr. Sanford’s case, that means withholding final judgment until he unveils his entire state budget, sometime in the next few weeks.

Lawmakers say the recent recession left them no choice but to cut funding to critical law enforcement services. If it turns out that the governor has short-changed equally critical services in order to restore funding, then he will be endorsing their argument. It has long been our belief, however, that many of the services our state provides are far less essential than law enforcement, public health and public education, and that even some of these services could be provided more efficiently if our government agencies were organized in a more rational fashion. We hope that the rest of Mr. Sanford’s budget will help to demonstrate this.