The first thing we thought of when the riders of the 2nd United States appeals circuit vacated the corruption conviction of Sheldon Silver is Raymond Donovan’s famous question: “Which office do I go to get my reputation back?” He was President Reagan’s labor secretary, who’d been driven from office by fraud charges only to be acquitted. In the event, Donovan went back to his successful construction business for another generation. Good for him.

The outlook is unlikely to be so promising for the former speaker of the New York Assembly. That’s because the appeals judges didn’t acquit Silver. They merely vacated his conviction for erroneous jury instructions, and they left the government clear to retry him again. Which it promptly announced it will do. There’s hardly a New Yorker who had not come to resent Mr. Silver’s rule and who was not appalled at the amount — more than $4 million — of his allegedly ill-gotten gains.

We ourselves had doubts at the start of the case against Silver, which we aired in an editorial called “Shame of New York.” It’s not that we were prepared to defend him. “His compensation for secret legal work would be appalling, even if it turns out to be legal,” we wrote. Our doubts centered on the so-called honest services statute, an overly-vague law under which Silver was indicted. The law had recently been narrowed by the Supreme Court to cases of real bribery.

The limitations the Supreme Court set on the use of honest services law had already led to the vacation of the conviction of the ex-majority leader in the Senate in Albany, Joe Bruno. In his second trial, Bruno was acquitted outright. By our lights, it’s a miscarriage of democracy, if not justice, if someone is driven from office by a prosecutor only to be acquitted. Where do the voters go, to put the question another way, to get back the man they voted for?

For Silver, the Second Circuit doesn’t hold out a lot of hope on that score. It stated flatly that the evidence the government presented against him was “sufficient to prove” counts on extortion, fraud, and money laundering. The 2nd circuit riders were unanimous. The fault they found was important but technical, having to do with the precedent the Supreme Court set when it vacated a bribery conviction against an ex-governor of Virginia, Bob McDonnell.

In the McDonnell case, the Supreme Court narrowed what constitutes an “official act.” McDonnell, the 2nd Circuit just decided, meant that federal prosecutors in New York had pushed the jury instructions too far. Prosecutors decided not to re-try Governor McDonnell, and it’s not hard to see why. In addition to everything else, the alleged bribery was something like $120,000 in gifts, trips, and other favors. That’s a pittance compared the Niagara of loot that flowed to Silver.

Which is all the more dramatic because of the air of modesty the Speaker liked to affect. His allies liked to stress his modest lifestyle. They would brush aside concerns over his outside legal work, and note that the Speaker would actually drive himself around in his own car. Over the years — for us at least — that persona eventually wore thin. Particularly in light of the monarchial and cynical way the Speaker ran the Assembly.

The Second Circuit panel itself seemed to handle Silver as if with a pair of tongs. “We recognize that many would view the facts adduced at Silver’s trial with distaste,” is the way one of the circuit’s wordsmiths, Judge Jose Cabranes, put it in the opinion. The question, the court said, was “not how a jury would likely view the evidence.” Rather it was whether it was “clear, beyond a reasonable doubt,” that “a rational jury, properly instructed” would have convicted Silver.

It would be inaccurate to say the circuit riders invited a retrial, even by noting that there was sufficient evidence for the fraud counts. Their point was that it just has to be done right, as it all too often wasn’t in the era when Preet Bharara was running federal prosecutions in New York, a fact that was well-marked by Charles Gasparino in the this morning’s New York Post and by our colleague Ira Stoll at FutureOfCapitalism.com.

Whatever happens at retrial, it’s a shocking thing that it has come to this. For even if Silver is brought to justice, what would it say that it had to be done by the Federal government, rather than New York state’s own institutions? Not the governor. Not the attorney general. Not the Moreland Commission. Not the Democratic caucus itself. Not the voters of the Manhattan’s Lower East Side. When this is all over, where are they going to go to get their reputations back?