The 123rd Legislature adjourned its first regular session of the two-year cycle last summer leaving a lot of important lawmaking un-done, including the cleaning up of its own ethical stable.

Now, thanks to House Speaker Glenn Cummings, D-Portland, and Senate President Beth Edmonds, D-Freeport, lawmakers have been given a chance to recover from that particular lapse.

They should take advantage of it promptly and unconditionally.

Cummings and Edmonds have introduced bills aimed at tightening and clarifying the state's legislative ethics and financial accountability laws.

Actually, it is more accurate to say they have "re-introduced" such legislation. These are reform proposals that have been kicking around in one form or another for years but have been treated with indifference by rank-and-file lawmakers.

Why is it, do you suppose, that legislators are so shy about passing bills that can only enhance their own public image?

Maybe they feel that it would be a tacit admission of susceptibility to conflicts of interest, misbehavior and outright corruption.

That really should not be a concern. The fact is, even though ours is a part-time citizen-legislature whose members depend on outside sources of income to support themselves, it has not been overly burdened with lawmakers who deliberately set out to use their public positions for private profit.

It is also a fact, however, that judgments about whether members do have conflicts of interest in any given situation are pretty much left up to the individual legislator.

This is true despite the existence of an independent commission that supposedly is responsible for advising the Legislature on such matters.

One problem with this is that the commission itself has at times proved nervous about making such judgments. This was dramatized a couple of years ago when a state representative who held a management position in the paper industry was charged with leveraging his position as a member of the Natural Resources Committee for the benefit of his private employer.

A coalition of environmental groups filed a detailed complaint with the ethics commission, which decided (mostly in private) not to take up the matter on the grounds that only another legislator could legally file such a complaint. That none had is testament to the biblical adage about judging not lest ye be judged.

This exercise in timidity prompted the creation -- by Edmonds and former House Speaker John Richardson, D-Brunswick -- of a special blue-ribbon study committee to look into ways of strengthening and clarifying the legislative ethics laws.

That group came up with a sterling set of recommendations, including tightening conflict-of-interest standards and allowing citizen complaints about possible abuses to be filed with the ethics commission.

These findings were presented last year to the Legislature, which at first delayed taking them under consideration and later booted the opportunity for meaningful reform altogether.

In the closing days of the session, lawmakers approved a mealy-mouthed recommendation by the Legal and Veterans' Affairs Committee to study the issue some more. It called for a review of the number of conflict complaints filed over a 10-year period, as if such frequency (or lack thereof) had anything at all to do with the adequacy of existing ethics rules.

In any case, the issue is back before the Legislature and cries out for action once and for all.

Edmonds' bill calls for broader, more detailed disclosure about the personal income sources of legislators and their immediate family members. It would apply to executive branch officials as well.

Cummings' bill incorporates most of the recommendations of the blue-ribbon committee. It also requires members of the ethics commission itself to file financial disclosure reports and provides a mechanism for the removal of commissioners.

There is already talk about -- guess what? -- studying the particulars of the new bills and maybe putting off reform yet again.

But while there may be room for amending sections of the leaders' proposals to soften some of the provisions as being too stringent and even a bit blinding in their transparency, the idea should be improvement, not more postponement.

There is no need to subject these bills to prolonged study. Each of the points involved have been studied to death. Further delay now would border on willful prevarication.

Doing nothing -- yet again -- would be a frank admission by legislators that they have no interest at all in ethics reform, that they are perfectly satisfied with a system that is dangerously vague and ineffectual, lacks accountability, invites abuse and slams the door on public participation.

Do they really care that little about their own institutional reputation?

Jim Brunelle is a weekly columnist and has been commenting on Maine issues for more than 40 years. He lives in Cape Elizabeth and can be reached at jbrune@maine.rr.com.