Until now, most of the news emerging in connection with the Pennsylvania General Assembly's Bonusgate scandal has centered on the alleged diversion of millions of dollars of public funds for political campaigns and other illegal purposes — and the people who are alleged to have been involved.

But state residents who have continued to be amazed and deeply troubled at the disclosures to date — that their state government has sunk to such a low depth — have a reason to feel hopeful about news of another phase of the investigation that they might not have previously contemplated.

It is the news that state Attorney General Tom Corbett is looking into possible obstruction of justice in connection with the scandal and that Corbett's investigators might pursue charges that some people destroyed — or at least attempted to destroy — incriminating records.

Indeed, the Bonusgate probe could never be considered complete unless such possibilities were probed.

An article in Sunday's Butler Eagle quoted Bill Costopoulos, a lawyer with extensive experience dealing with grand jury investigations and defending people charged with obstruction of justice. Costopoulos said judges can view obstruction as a threat to the justice system and that prosecutors often consider overt acts of obstruction to be an attempt to subvert their own efforts and therefore can respond as if they personally had been insulted.

"It really goes to the integrity of the one accused," he said. "It's one thing to get funds to staffers that did campaign work; it's another thing to be accused of a lack of honor and integrity."

Many state residents watching developments in the Bonusgate scandal must be thinking that an exodus of honor and integrity in state government must have taken place years ago, and that Bonusgate is merely a product of that exodus.

It was a lack of honor and integrity that spawned the July 2005 middle-of-the-night pay raise, the subsequent emergence of unvouchered expenses — a device used to circumvent the law prohibiting lawmaker pay raises during the session in which they were approved — and even the 2001 pension grab that portends big problems for tax-paying state residents for years to come.

State lawmakers are sent to Harrisburg to represent their constituents. But increasingly it's being cemented into constituents' realization that the reason it takes so long for so little to be done in the state capital is because so many lawmakers are engaged in activities and damage control that their public service never was intended to entail.

That's why the General Assembly "housecleaning" begun by voters in 2006 as a result of the pay-raise fiasco is deserving of a "Chapter 2" this year.

Bonusgate has given the voters plenty of reasons to be furious, even if only a handful of legislators were directly involved. Regardless of the number eventually implicated, it's time for a stern message to again be delivered that state residents will no longer tolerate legislative service centered more on self-serving objectives than on constituent service and the overall betterment of the commonwealth.

According to the Sunday article, a footnote buried deep within the 74-page grand jury report that was released July 10 in support of criminal charges against a dozen people with ties to the House Democratic caucus said simply that "matters pertaining to potential obstruction or destruction of evidence remain part of the grand jury's ongoing investigation."

That phase of the probe must not rest until all leads and allegations have been fully addressed.