There's more than one way to skin a corrupt pol.

Public officials owe a duty to their constituents not to use their offices for personal gain.

But is that duty legal or moral? Prior to a recent U.S. Supreme Court ruling, the federal "honest services" statute held public officials to a strict standard. But the high court found it so vague as to be meaningless and cut its interpretation back to a "quid pro quo" standard.

In other words, to be guilty of violating the honest-services statute, public officials would have to trade one thing (jobs, contracts, appointments) for another (a financial or personal reward).

Illinois U.S. Sen. Mark Kirk, working with a bipartisan group in Congress, is seeking to restore the old standard but to do so in a way that passes constitutional muster.

If he can, it'll be all to the good. Illinois politicians for years have used winks, nods and shrugs to do their business. It's sort of a vague "I'll give you something you want today and, in a year or so, I'll be the recipient of your largesse."

Some people describe that as the grease of politics, but it's also the stuff of greasy corruption — at least in Illinois.

Kirk's legislation would replace the dangerously vague and now stricken old "honest services" requirement by replacing it with a new standard of undisclosed conflicts of interest resulting in personal financial gain. Kirk's new version of "honest services" borrows language from a long-standing federal conflict-of-interest statute that already applies to the executive branch of government. That statute has been approved by a federal court of appeals, but not the U.S. Supreme Court.

So while its constitutionality has been examined, it has not been approved by the nation's highest court. Nonetheless, Kirk's proposal represents a sincere effort to address a real problem.

The high court's decision to strike down the old honest-services standard as unacceptably vague was an eminently reasonable decision. The law requires clarity. But there has to be a way to strike at the distressing manner in which so many politicians use their offices to feather their own nests as well as those of their friends and campaign supporters.

Kirk has offered one, and it's worth a try.