Opinion

Cuomo’s on the case

Gov. Cuomo yesterday took effective custody of the Sheldon Silver-Vito Lopez sexual-harassment scandal — urging his hand-tooled Joint Commission on Public Ethics to work its way to the bottom of Albany’s latest bubbling cesspool.

JCOPE was Cuomo’s idea, and six of the agency’s 14 members — including Executive Director Ellen Biben — are Cuomo retainers of some standing.

As is Letizia Tagliaferro, named by Biben yesterday as JCOPE’s director of investigations and enforcement.

These are people of considerable talent, as well. They’re well-equipped to make quick work of the Silver-Lopez scandal — should they choose to do so.

And if they don’t — well, it’s on Cuomo.

Late yesterday, the governor publicly called on JCOPE to investigate the sexual-harassment allegations against Lopez.

Good for the governor.

But any investigation that doesn’t include a thorough public airing of just how the Assembly came to make a surreptitious $103,000, taxpayer-funded payment to make the Lopez claim go away will be no investigation at all.

Silver, of course, had to be right in the middle of it all; no payment of any sort would have been made without the Assembly speaker’s imprimatur.

So a serious probe by definition means that Cuomo and Silver are hell-bent for a major collision.

Fine by us.

Cuomo came to office promising “a new day in Albany” and a vow to “restore honor and integrity to government.”

Not that he’s in any way responsible for Lopez’s misdeeds, of course. Nor for those of Albany’s legion of legislative malfeasors.

Silver, on the other hand, has been an enabler of misconduct for years — going back at least to when he used tax dollars to bail one of his own key aides out of a sexual-misconduct mess.

Authorizing Lopez’s payout, in other words, was just another day at the office for the speaker.

And, in that respect, getting to the bottom of Silver’s behavior is — institutionally speaking — of far more importance than determining who Lopez groped and when he groped them.

Lopez, it appears, is just a pig.

Silver is one of the most powerful elected officials in Albany — not someone who should be rolling around in the muck with all the other oinkers.

Silver said yesterday that he believes the secret payout was “wrong . . . from the perspective of transparency.”

Said Cuomo: “I think JCOPE should do an investigation of the allegations that have been made and let’s have the facts.”

From his lips to Biben’s ear.

We don’t doubt that she’s listening.