EDITORIAL ANYTHING GOES ETHICS RULES AT SCHOOL DISTRICT, LIKE CITY, ARE LOOSE.

WHEN LAUSD officials were confronted with data that raise concerns about a possible conflict of interest involving the firm that provides the district with political advice, they responded by saying they have a fire wall in place to prevent wrongdoing.

The firm, Rose & Kindel, was advising the Los Angeles Unified School District and Superintendent Roy Romer at the same time it was lobbying in Sacramento for private firms that had extensive contracts with the district.

Just the appearance of such relationships is disturbing, although there's no evidence that Rose & Kindel improperly used its position. But appearances are important, and the access that the firm had could have easily been abused.

Maybe there's no crossover in business dealing, maybe there is. Those kinds of things are hard to know for sure in the wink-wink, nudge-nudge political game of implied understandings that are the hallmark of Los Angeles government.

Still, it doesn't change the fact that toothless ethical requirements allow for such unseemly deals to take place. And language in the LAUSD's code of conduct for contractors treats the appearance of conflicts of interest as just as potentially damaging as actual conflicts.

The culpability of the LAUSD aside, this situation of lobbyists' working for both the shiller and the shillee is one of the things that makes politics so dirty in Los Angeles.

It shows that just about anything goes in L.A., so long as everyone promises that they aren't doing anything naughty while they spread out the wealth through million-dollar contracts.

We could beat up the LAUSD for a while, but it wouldn't be fair to single out the school district. It modeled its rules after the city's.

All of this should put to rest the argument that the phony ethics-reforms measures pushed by the City Council will have any effect at all at cleaning up City Hall, or the school district, for that matter.

But that isn't going to happen. Indeed, the City Council needs the cover of phony ethics-reforms measures as part of its shell game involving term-limit extensions on the November ballot.

The reforms -- which City Attorney Rocky Delgadillo says actually weaken some existing rules and could be adopted by a simple vote of the council -- would ban all fundraising by lobbyists, require greater disclosure and registration of lobbyists, and ban their appointment to city commissions.

What's so pathetic about those so-called reforms is that the council's first calls to solicit funds for their term-limits expansion measure will be to lobbyists and to the clients they represent.

The problem isn't just that the rules are weak and full of loopholes. The problem is that the officials themselves are so jaded from living and working in a corrupt environment for so long that they don't even know the difference between right and wrong.

And that's as good a definition as any of ``crazy.''