What is the role of Alaska’s Lieutenant Governor?

Perhaps you were flabbergasted this week when you — along with hundreds of Mat-Su Valley residents — received automated calls from Alaska Lt. Gov. Mead Treadwell urging them to vote for specific candidates in the Oct. 2 Mat-Su Borough election.

It seems to be a trend gathering steam for elected officials of the same political stripe to campaign for others running under the same banner for elected office. But when the guy doing the endorsing oversees elections for the whole state, as Treadwell does in his capacity as lieutenant governor, that’s a horse of a different color.

Is it illegal? Treadwell’s office doesn’t seem to think so.

Is it unethical? That’s what many callers and letter writers have told us this week in the wake of this round of robo calls from Treadwell.

Some say ethics is a tricky business. But it’s important business.

Just ask the folks who used to own and operate Veco about the downside of splitting ethical hairs and massaging the truth to arrive at your preferred answer. Ask them how much money they lost when Veco was sold in the wake of Alaska’s most infamous ethics scandal.

But ethics that were too tricky for Veco to sort out were set right in short order when employee-owned CH2M Hill bought the business at fire-sale prices. Their company handbook presents a useful measuring stick for even the most routine ethics considerations: If you wouldn’t want to read about it on the front page of the newspaper, don’t do it.

Whether Treadwell’s actions amount to legal wrongdoing is not for us to decide. But we do question the ethics and wisdom of his choice.

We think the bar for ethical behavior for politicians should be the same bar used to measure ethical behavior among journalists. Would it be OK if our editor or publisher recorded calls endorsing any candidate? For us, the answer is no, never.

While we have endorsed candidates in the past, when we do so, it’s typically for state and national offices, and we issue endorsements in the name of the Frontiersman.

If this soft-on-ethics behavior is OK from Treadwell, where does it end? How far will we accept the stretching of the truth? How much unethical, but possibly not illegal, behavior is too much?

Zero tolerance policy is the policy that best serves the public good. The goal should be for elected officials to avoid anything that even gives the appearance of wrongdoing.