EDITORIAL RAMPART REDUX OFFICIAL BUNGLING KEEPS COSTING TAXPAYERS MILLIONS.

THE further removed we become from the Rampart saga that engulfed the Los Angeles Police Department, the clearer it becomes that the real ``scandal'' wasn't widespread police corruption, but city leaders' overblown response to the allegations.

We're still paying for that response.

Last week, a jury unanimously awarded $5 million in civil-rights claims each to three one-time LAPD officers who were prosecuted for - and acquitted of - allegedly framing a gang member. The jury agreed with the cops' argument that the LAPD had scapegoated them in a desperate attempt to deflect Rampart-related scrutiny.

That ruling alone will cost the city's taxpayers $15 million, plus all the attendant legal fees.

But that's only the beginning. The city also has had to pay out some $70 million to settle lawsuits that sprang up in the midst of Rampart hysteria.

Then there's the $50 million the city must spend every year - and will continue spending for years to come - complying with the hastily signed federal consent decree that then-City Attorney James Hahn negotiated during the height of the post-Rampart furor in 2002.

And for what?

For all the sensationalism that Rampart generated among unscrupulous media outlets and professional cop-haters, in the end it was little more than the story of criminal misconduct on the part of a few rogue cops. A serious problem, to be sure, but nothing close to the purported tales of rampant, department-wide corruption - with officers running wild, stealing drugs, framing the innocent and killing suspects.

This is the real scandal: A CYA mentality on the part of nervous bureaucrats and politicians that's costing taxpayers hundreds of millions of dollars and continues to handcuff the LAPD, preventing the public from having adequate police services.

City Councilman Bernard Parks, who was LAPD chief at the time, rejects the latest ruling, and chalks it up to the anti-L.A. bias of an Orange County jury. That's a convenient explanation, but it hardly squares with the cops' earlier criminal acquittal, or much else that has transpired over the past few years.

If L.A. leaders want to know whom to blame for the continuing drain Rampart puts on the city treasury, they need only look in the mirror.