We cannot repeat often enough that what is legal isn’t necessarily what is right. Put another way, while the law may require meeting a high standard of evidentiary proof to be met before imposing a penalty on someone accused of wrongdoing, society has every right to impose sanctions on individuals who hold public office for merely committing the appearance of impropriety. Officials regularly complain that this is a double standard, and it is, but then every child knows the line from Spiderman: “With great power comes great responsibility.”

This is what our officials refuse to see. Their blindness in the face of a simple rule of thumb concerning official behavior is the cause of the disrepute in which officialdom tends to be held. What our officials refuse to acknowledge is that in a country in which the rule of law is more often than not determined by the power of the purse, legal processes themselves are not sufficient to produce justice. The processes have to be facilitated by self-control on the part of officials, and encouraged by the watchfulness of the citizenry.

For this reason, an official, say, a senator, might shrill against the media, as Miguel Zubiri did, denying he had ever done anything to stop the Senate inquiry into the fertilizer scam (he filed no resolution and talked to no colleague about the matter, he protested) after echoing a colleague’s call for the blue ribbon committee to drop its plan to compel former undersecretary of agriculture Jocelyn Bolante to testify.

The same could be said of Agrarian Reform Secretary Nasser Pangandaman’s refusal to see what outraged the public about the conduct of his sons and his own behavior in the Valley Golf Club mauling incident. From the start, spin, and not accountability, was his tactic. First, he tried to present his family as the victims; then, he played the ethnic card, and trumpeted his families’ virtues. But he ignored the reality that galled the public: whenever an official has bodyguards in tow, no fisticuffs are ever fair. And no investigation can ever be impartial, because of the politico’s clout with the powers-that-be, the kind of clout Pangandaman underscored by going to Baguio City to be seen at the side of President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo herself.

Or take the case of Justice Undersecretary Ricardo Blancaflor. He took a call from the family of Richard Brodett, who was facing an investigation for drug dealing. He took it because he knew the parents of Brodett. He took it upon himself to inquire as to the status of the case, when “inquiries” by officials have become notorious as instances of influence peddling (“Will I still win by one million?” comes to mind). Blancaflor, by all accounts, is widely respected. He may have acted on the principle that justice delayed is justice denied. But these are times when deviating from official procedures by resorting to the gray areas, in which officialdom often tries to find ways to humanize the inexorable harshness of the law, has become increasingly impermissible.

The public has an increasing intolerance for such cases of official consideration because it has come to expect a more impersonal, and thus, equitable, approach to the justice process. We all know our institutions are understaffed and overworked. What we expect is the democracy of the queue and of not jumping the line merely on some official’s (well-intentioned or not) say-so.

The same applies to the behavior of officials who seem to be under the impression that what constitutes wrongdoing is only what can be proven in court, after a tremendous amount of money and time is spent on litigation. That a crime, to be worthy of punishment, requires being caught on the spot with a smoking gun. Anything else constitutes a gray area in which official wrongdoing can be hidden under the presumption of legality.

A modern, democratic society substitutes official discretion and similar gray areas, for a fussy, often slow, and tedious devotion to doing everything by the book. Blancaflor is simply the latest example of the adjustments officials — and not just the public — have to endure, if we are to eliminate the more flexible but highly corruptible present for a more orderly and fair future.