The spectacle of a member of state Attorney General Jerry Brown's staff having to resign for breaking the law isn't a pretty one, but it was necessary.

As the highest law enforcement official in California, Brown must hold himself ---- and by extension, his staff ---- to a consistent standard of obeying the laws his office is charged with upholding.

That Communications Director Scott Gerber was secretly recording telephone conversations with news reporters left him with no choice but to resign, given that California law bans the recording of conversations unless all parties to the call are notified that it is being taped. And it's not as if this is some obscure law, either ---- anyone who's ever called customer support has heard the recording that your call may be monitored; if the phone and cable companies can understand and obey the law, certainly the attorney general's staff can as well.

Even though Gerber has done the honorable thing and resigned, Brown still needs to step up and offer the voters who elected him a fuller explanation of how this breach of law happened on his watch. True, nobody can watch over their staff all the time ---- but good leaders are effective because they instill in their staffs a sense of the obligations and responsibilities that are expected.

Perhaps Brown did indeed do all of these things, and Gerber simply screwed up.

But if Brown wants to seek a return to the governorship, he needs to lay out how he communicates to his staff what expectations are, and how and why Gerber fell short of them.