The big challenge before Governor Spitzer is to prove that he can get things done without intimidating his adversaries or using the subpoena power. That thought comes to mind in the wake of the dramatic new development in the lawsuit that Mr. Spitzer launched, back when he was attorney general, against the former president of the New York Stock Exchange, Richard Grasso. The lawsuit stemmed from Mr. Spitzer’s reckoning that Mr. Grasso’s compensation package from the stock exchange — $187.5 million — was unreasonable for the not-for-profit corporate form under which the exchange was organized at the time Mr. Grasso headed it.

Mr. Spitzer was well up on his high horse, back when he had the subpoena. And he won some early rounds in the lower courts. But in an editorial called “Grasso Agonistes,” we cautioned that the road ahead could prove treacherous for the attorney general. And sure enough, in a dramatic development yesterday, an appellate court in Manhattan issued a devastating ruling against Mr. Spitzer. Essentially, the judges found that the attorney general lacked standing to bring the kind of case he did against Mr. Grasso — or, to put it in laymen’s terms, that he was essentially throwing his weight around without legal authority.

This is a view of the governor that a lot of people in this town nursed when he was but attorney general. He gained a $10 million settlement out of Sony BMG Music Entertainment over the way it promoted its products; or, as we put it in an editorial, he was chasing disc jockeys while being asleep at the switch on Medicaid fraud. Attorney General Spitzer even went after the tax return preparer H&R Block for the fees it charged on IRAs, which these columns remarked on in an editorial called “Spitzer Versus the Poor.” In our view, about the only thing the campaign by subpoena strategy gained for Mr. Spitzer was the headlines needed to help him campaign for governor.

The hard part for Mr. Spitzer is going to be learning the art of governing sans subpoena, and on the evidence of the record in Albany, his progress is slow, though we very much wish him well. If he starts to falter, he is no doubt going to get challenged somewhere. That is what we take from the dispatch by Frederick U. Dicker of the New York Post, suggesting that Mayor Bloomberg is thinking of trying for governor instead of president. The mayor says the story is made up out of whole cloth, and we certainly hope so. We’re rooting for the mayor to run for the presidency, which strikes us as an office even more fitting for a man who can get things done without a subpoena.