For an Independent Look

The revelation that officials of the city treasurer’s office deliberately altered a document indicating that Mayor Tom Bradley had instructed them to deposit public funds in a bank that employed him as a consultant makes it imperative that the conflict-of-interest charges leveled against the mayor be resolved quickly and definitively.

The City Council must now admit that it has failed to do what should have been done months ago, which is to appoint a nonpartisan special counsel to investigate the charges against the mayor. The fact that this latest revelation came in testimony from a city auditor before a council committee is further evidence that City Attorney James K. Hahn and his aides have neither the political independence nor the investigative acumen to bring this scandal to a credible and expeditious conclusion.

Mayor Bradley has generally responded to the charges against him with silence. He has made that his strategy. The people who have five times elected him to their city’s highest office deserve better. At the very minimum, he ought to explain why City Treasurer Leonard Rittenberg and the other officials alleged to have tampered with these records have been allowed to continue exercising the full range of their responsibilities while the charges against them remain unresolved.