“I just told you, I had absolutely — the first I heard of it was today. If I had known there was fake organizations in there do you really think that I would have signed the budget? Thank you very much. One would hope you’d expect a little more from me, for goodness sakes.”

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Well, for goodness sakes, we assigned the question, and we don’t mind saying the mayor’s answer struck us as just a bit huffy. We are into the last quarter of a mayoralty that seeks as its legacy not an inspirational ideology but a reputation for managerial competence. And the disclosure that investigators are looking into the possibility that under at least two speakers of the city council, millions and millions of taxpayers’ dollars are being funneled in to dummy front groups to serve as slush funds for our politicians, well, it just strikes us as a situation that invites a bit more humility from the principal budgetary figure in the city.

We don’t suggest for a moment that the mayor is a crook. We’ve little doubt that the main focus of this investigation — first reported by the New York Post — is going to be the speaker, Christine Quinn, and the former speaker, Gifford Miller, on whose watch, our own reporting discloses, the dummy organizations reported to be under investigation were also receiving millions of dollars in taxpayer cash. Ms. Quinn has had her considerable virtues as speaker, and it would be a tragedy were she found to be culpable in this. She says she tried to stop the practice, and we’ll see what investigators find.

But it’s no small thing for the mayor, innocent though he no doubt is, that, in the fourth quarter of his administration, this sort of thing is turning up as a surprise to him. We are in an extraordinary period in government in this state and city. We’ve just watched a governor who got elected by a historic margin on a reform ticket get brought down in the tawdriest of scandals, having failed to lay even a glove on the problems he himself identified in Albany. We’ve watched his handpicked successor, our current governor, flounder around amid disclosures of his own sexual — and campaign finance — adventures.

Here in the city, the previous speaker, Mr. Miller, left office in term-limited disgrace, after it was reported — by this paper — that a large printing job for flyers had been broken up into myriad tiny jobs so as to evade the requirement to put the work out for bids, a process that would have disclosed the political nature of the mailers going out to boost the speaker’s reputation on the taxpayers’ dime. And now another speaker is in danger of being disgraced. Where is the leader who is going to wade into the council and set about the long work of cleaning it up?