With one Miami commissioner suspended by Gov. Charlie Crist and another who has resigned to Mayor Tomás Regalado effective Monday, the Magic City will need more than a bag of tricks to right itself.

Unfortunately, Commissioner Michelle Spence-Jones seems to want to play her own tricks.

As rumors swirled about her impending arrest, Ms. Spence-Jones called the questioning of her ethics a ``public lynching.'' On Friday, she turned herself in, charged with grand theft in a scheme involving a family business that benefited from a $50,000 Miami-Dade grant that didn't belong to her.

Ms. Spence-Jones does her constituents a grave disservice when she conjures up such a horrendous image as a lynching. In fact, the four people who provided testimony and evidence to the State Attorney's Office are African Americans. Among them is Ms. Spence-Jones' mentor, former Miami-Dade Commissioner Barbara Carey-Shuler.

Constituents cannot lose sight of the fact that somehow two $25,000 grants that were to be used in 2005 to help two nonprofits open an art complex and spruce up Liberty City storefronts ended up with Karym Ventures, then owned by Ms. Spence-Jones and her family.

How? Prosecutors say Ms. Spence-Jones, then an aide to former Mayor Manny Diaz, falsified a letter in Ms. Carey-Shuler's name instructing the county's social service agency to hand over the money to Ms. Spence-Jones. Ms. Carey-Shuler, then county commission chairwoman, says she never wrote or signed the letter.

The losers here are Ms. Spence-Jones' constituents who didn't see their dreams materialize as she or family members allegedly used the public's money for trips to New York and Los Angeles, fancy colognes and a number of other perks.

Ms. Spence-Jones also received $8,000 from a $25,000 grant for a nonprofit founded by her pastor, the Rev. Gaston Smith, who maintains he's innocent in that case.

From the beginning of her first term, Ms. Spence-Jones has proved to be obtusely defensive about any wrong-doing. Last year, the state elections commission fined her $8,000 for violations. She also paid a $500 fine to the Miami-Dade Ethics Commission on another matter.

Angel Gonzalez also has been ethically challenged, but at least he seems remorseful. He will plead guilty to a second-degree misdemeanor for using his public office to benefit his daughter, Elizabeth, who received $47,000 between July 2004 and May 2006 on the payroll of a city contractor, Delant Construction. She never worked a day, prosecutors say, but collected the money.

Mr. Gonzalez surely missed the ethics lesson when he voted on city contracts involving Delant and did not recuse himself because his daughter ``worked'' there. Shameful.

The new mayor now must deal with a monumental crisis. He has only one seasoned commissioner, Marc Sarnoff, left on the dais, two new commissioners (one of them to be elected in a runoff on Tuesday) and two open seats. All facing an impending financial crisis for the city.

Gov. Charlie Crist may have to appoint one new commissioner, and the commission would pick the other. Either way, it will be messy. Ideally, the city would hold elections quickly but that's expensive. Voters must wait until 2010.

The governor, who is running for the U.S. Senate, has said he wants to empanel a grand jury to investigate corruption -- from Tallahassee to South Florida. That's fine, but prosecutors haven't been sleeping. Scandals have rocked Palm Beach, Broward and now, again, Miami-Dade.

Federal and state prosecutors have gone on the offensive, and that's all to the good. When ethics laws are as weak as they are in Florida and enforcement turns soft, taxpayers lose.

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