Kane's addiction

For a woman who purports to be dismayed and appalled by it, Kathleen Kane has a surprisingly intimate relationship with pornography. In fact, the attorney general has made the genre the deliberate focus of her administration for more than a year. If Kane is remembered as anything other than an ostensible law enforcer who undermined criminal investigations while accruing criminal charges, it will be as Pennsylvania's porn prosecutor.

Since Kane accidentally uncovered thousands of pornographic and offensive emails exchanged by prosecutors, judges, and other officials, their disclosure has been advocated by, among others, a governor, a chief justice, The Inquirer, and Kane herself. And yet the Democratic attorney general has repeatedly found herself unable to let go of the porn, fighting its release in court and opting instead for a peep-show policy of strategic revelations that divert attention from her alleged misdeeds while punishing her enemies.

Kane's habit started last year, around the time The Inquirer reported that a special prosecutor was looking into whether she illegally leaked confidential grand jury information to smear her nemesis Frank Fina, a top deputy to her Republican predecessor Tom Corbett. Shortly thereafter, Kane released her first fusillade of dirty emails linked to top officials in the Corbett administration - while refusing to release those linked to scores of other state officials, including her subordinates.

She used pornography again in August, when a trove connected to Fina and another former state prosecutor was released soon after Kane was charged with perjury and other crimes in the grand jury leak. Last week, after she was charged with additional counts and the state Supreme Court suspended her law license, she dropped another smut bomb said to be connected to high court Justice J. Michael Eakin.

The emails, which have already appropriately ended the political careers of several ranking officials, are of legitimate public concern. They suggest rampant misogyny, bigotry, and idiocy among public officials, as well as unethical fraternization among judges and prosecutors. The trouble is that by misusing the evidence as revenge porn, Kane has diminished this issue almost as thoroughly as she has tarnished her office.

The courts or an impartial executive authority - such as a special prosecutor, the auditor general, or the Open Records Office - should put a merciful stop to Kane's striptease by forcing a systematic, wholesale release of the emails. Meanwhile, an independent investigation must determine appropriate administrative or criminal penalties for any misuse of state resources by the emailers.

Of course, one agency that can't conduct an objective investigation is the Attorney General's Office. For that and other reasons, the legislature and Gov. Wolf must act to remove Kane from office and relieve her of the power to misuse the state's top law enforcement agency for her own perverse purposes.