AN ATTORNEY GENERAL’S ruling carries no legal weight, and state officials frequently ignore those that take them to task. So Comptroller General Richard Eckstrom is to be commended for immediately reversing his earlier actions after Attorney General Henry McMaster issued an opinion saying he had no legal right to pay off a deficit that the state has been running for more than a decade.

We hope the General Assembly now will follow suit and reverse its inappropriate actions — which is what Mr. Eckstrom had been trying to do.

The problem, which had been swept under the rug until Mr. Eckstrom unmasked it this fall, dates back to 1991, when the Budget and Control Board voted to pay off bills from the fiscal year that ended in June by essentially floating a check — changing the state’s accounting methods, so that some July sales tax receipts could be counted toward the previous fiscal year. The Legislature did nothing to reverse that action, and in fact did the same thing itself, with other tax receipts, in 1993. And again in 2002. This practice probably didn’t violate the state’s constitutional prohibition on deficit spending, but it was the sort of irresponsible maneuver that the financial market rightly frowns on.

What’s worse: This isn’t the only way the Legislature has been outed creating a deficit it had tried to hide from the public. In 2003, Mr. Eckstrom and Gov. Mark Sanford discovered that instead of paying off a shortfall that had occurred at the end of the 2002 fiscal year (as legislative leaders had promised to do), the Legislature had allowed it to linger for more than a year, turning it into another deficit — this one clearly unconstitutional — that lawmakers had tried to pretend didn’t exist.

In both instances, Mr. Sanford and Mr. Eckstrom provided the outside perspective that is all too hard to find in a legislative environment that is built around protecting the status quo and a Legislature that operates as though the state motto is “that’s how we’ve always done it, so it must be right.” Whatever you might think of their politics, that’s a valuable contribution. One wonders if either matter would ever have been acknowledged — much less addressed — without their badgering.

Last time, legislators immediately promised that this time they really meant it when they said they would pay off the deficit. But even then, it took quite some doing, with senators playing games over the repayment right up until the closing days of the 2004 session.

We expect better of them this time around. If any legislators consider Mr. McMaster’s ruling a vindication, they need to think again. The fact that we had to come to this point is a testament to their grossly irresponsible behavior. They can only begin to redeem themselves by quickly putting the books in order.