Any hopes that State Inspector General Kristine Hamann would clear the air around her dubious investigation of the Spitzer’s administration misuse of state police were dashed yesterday when she testified before a Senate investigative panel. Her testimony was full of self-contradictions, inconsistencies, and abandonment of logic.

Ms. Hamann opened by declaring her opposition to proposed Senate legislation that would require her office to hand over investigations of the executive chamber to the attorney general. “I would be stripped of my ability to be an inspector general in the most important cases,” she said. “Your proposal would deprive the governor of the ability to investigate his own staff.” It would have been only a half credible line of argument even if she hadn’t flubbed her big assignment. In any event, what she is arguing is that conflicts of interest are her business. Her office is designed to handle them.

Without missing a beat, Ms. Hamman proceeded to excuse how her office was incapable of handling the most “important case” of her eight-month tenure. Why? Well, because of a conflict of interest. She ordered her office to abort its investigation of the governor’s office after she determined that Mr. Spitzer’s chief of staff, Richard Baum, to whom she reports, might have been involved in improper activity. Her detection of a conflict of interest didn’t stop her from concurring with Attorney General Cuomo’s report on the scandal, which strongly suggested that Mr. Baum was aware of the effort to tarnish Senate Republican leader, Joseph Bruno.

Her second reason for abandoning the case was that she couldn’t continue in such a “politically-charged atmosphere.” She spoke as if any probe into the governor’s office could be unencumbered by partisan politics and public attention. Yet in an effort to demonstrate her ability to investigate the second floor, Ms. Hamann then pointed to her handling of a probe of a former Spitzer energy adviser, Steven Mitnick, accused of having threatened a Republican-appointed public service commissioner. Ms. Hamann, who boasted about eating conflicts of interests for breakfast, took the extraordinary step of allowing Mr. Baum to recuse himself as her supervisor.

Yet Ms. Hamann never answered why Mr. Baum didn’t recuse himself during her probe of Troopergate. By her logic, such a move would have allowed her to continue with the investigation and use her subpoena power to interview him and other administration officials. She said she didn’t refer the case to the attorney general and give him subpoena power because she concluded she wasn’t investigating criminal or indictable offenses and so didn’t have the authority.

Ms. Hamann bases that judgment on the findings of the report of Mr. Cuomo’s office, which lacked subpoena power and thus couldn’t interview the most important figures in the cases, Mr. Baum and Mr. Spitzer’s communications director, Darren Dopp. Even more remarkable, she drew that conclusion without even knowing whether her office talked to Messrs. Baum and Dopp. “I did not know that they didn’t testify,” she told reporters, according to the Daily News’s political blog.

It’s a shame that Ms. Hamann, a former criminal prosecutor who served honorably under Manhattan district attorney Robert Morgenthau for more than two decades, felt compelled to fall back on inconsistency rather than own up to mistakes committed by her office, which simply didn’t do its job. If it’s her reputation that she’s trying to protect, floundering in front of a Senate investigative panel isn’t helping out her case. If it’s the governor she would like to save, she didn’t do him a service either.

We predict this will be handled, over the long haul, by the political sphere. Some say that will result in a pass for the governor, but we’re not so sure. The Senate’s reputation is also at stake, as it has now taken a leading role in investigating the scandal. From both Mr. Bruno and Mr. Spitzer, voters are looking for constructive work in solving the problems facing the state — a wave of job losses in the New York City financial services industry, a high tax rate, soaring health-care costs, a sagging upstate economy, housing costs soaring because of rent control, children being failed by a government education monopoly.

If Mr. Spitzer seizes the policy initiative he may be able to get the voters to forget about this scandal, while if Mr. Bruno seizes on the scandal to the exclusion of substantive initiatives, the public may lose interest. If Mr. Spitzer fails to seize the policy initiative, he may be remembered in the end primarily for Troopergate. We’re all for getting to the bottom of Troopergate, but it would be too bad for the state if that means all other business in Albany is suspended until that happens.