After eight years of an attorney general who saw successful businessmen, rather than Albany politicians, as his targets, how refreshing it is to have an attorney general in the state who doesn’t shy from turning his attention to his fellow officeholders. Plenty of attention, following the release yesterday of Andrew Cuomo’s report on the politicization of the state police by Governor Spitzer’s top aides, will be focused on the governor and on the political rival the governor tried to smear, the Senate Majority Leader, Joseph Bruno. And deservedly so.

But it would be a mistake to allow the episode to pass without offering some praise of Mr. Cuomo for tackling the issue of an abuse of power by a fellow Democrat. Mr. Cuomo’s report said the acting superintendent of the state police “permitted the Governor’s liaison to lead him and the State Police squarely into the middle of politics, precisely where they do not belong.”

It’s an ironical turn of events, because if one had to predict at the beginning of the year a Democratic officeholder who would turn out to be a vindictive political hack, one would have guessed it would be Mr. Cuomo. Instead Mr. Cuomo has staffed his office with an impressive team of former federal prosecutors and ferreted out abuses in the office of Mr. Spitzer. Talk about everything changing on day one.

There are enough terrorist threats and crime in New York State that the last thing the state police need to be deployed as are political hit men for Mr. Spitzer to use against his political rivals. It was a stunning error of judgment. If Mr. Spitzer wanted to use his campaign funds to hire private investigators to trail Mr. Bruno, that’d be one thing. If he wanted to have his political aides do it, that’d be one thing. Politics isn’t beanbag, as the adage goes. But involving the state police in the plot was an idea so offensive to our democratic bedrock that it’s hard to imagine much worse, as Mr. Cuomo’s report underscores.

Mr. Cuomo’s report is a step in the right direction, but it’s unlikely that the voters of the state will be fully satisfied with a resolution of the matter until it’s clearer what the governor knew and when he knew it. That will require document discovery and perhaps testimony under oath that goes beyond the investigation conducted by the attorney general. If Mr. Spitzer recognizes the errors made here, as he claimed yesterday that he does, he won’t object to either measure to assure that the responsibility for politicizing the state police is placed not on underlings but on the highest-ranking official with knowledge of the plan.