This week's resignation of Ohio Consumers' Counsel Robert Tongren, who was caught up in a controversy over the shredding of a taxpayer-funded report, was unfortunate but perhaps inevitable.

Tongren had served Ohioans well, most observers agreed, saving consumers hundreds of millions of dollars during the past decade in various cases involving electric utilities.

But that was overshadowed by his office's destruction of a consultant's study that concluded Akron-based FirstEnergy deserved to recover about $4.7 billion less in "stranded costs" from ratepayers than it was actually allowed under the state's deregulation plan.

A change at the helm will mean greater state scrutiny over the counsel's office, which has lost some credibility in the FirstEnergy case. Early this year, several groups had requested the documents, for which the state paid $579,000, but were told none were available under the state's public records laws. Last month, it came out that the report had been destroyed in July, after Tongren's office changed an internal policy on how long such documents should be kept.

Naturally, many concluded Tongren purposely kept that information from the public, noting that he had often tried to avoid the sort of litigation that might have been inevitable if Ohioans had learned there was expert opinion saying FirstEnergy deserved only $4 billion from them instead of the $8.7 billion it got.

Tongren claimed consumers got a better deal by not fighting FirstEnergy, as the state would have lost in court. Few bought that argument.

State officials should use this crisis to address the larger questions it raised about how agencies such as the Public Utilities Commission of Ohio have handled the vaunted deregulation plan, which was supposed to bring consumers dramatic savings on their electric bills, and whether Ohio consumers' interests are being well served. They ought to find out why the competitive, market-driven environment in electric services that consumers were promised just hasn't materialized on a wide scale.

And it should serve as yet another reminder to those officials that the rule in Ohio, as the state Supreme Court has clearly said, is that public records are to be available to the public unless there's a very good reason for their exclusion.

This wasn't such a case. Deregulation may be an extremely complex issue, even for the lawmakers who were immersed in it for years. But the public clearly has the right to be informed on how the system's supposed to work and how much it's going to cost them.