Earlier this month, William Nichols Jr., Williamsport’s former finance director, was sentenced to 12 months of probation for felony charges of tampering with public records and theft by failure to make required disposition.

Nichols’ “leadership,” if it can be called that, had evaded requirements and stipulations for how state and federal grant money could be spent — a practice he continued for years through evasiveness regarding oversight and what many deemed to be a bullying approach to anyone else who attempted to implement that oversight.

We find the scope of his actions contradict the assertions of his supporters — and the judge responsible for his sentencing — that his misappropriation of tax dollars was not self-serving and instead “altruistic” — one aspect of the allegations to which he pleaded guilty was creating tax dollar-paid jobs that otherwise would not exist and did not need to exist to offer to friends and acquaintances.

We find both the notion that his crimes were somehow selfless and only to serve the city — a city now confronted with serious fiscal perils because of these crimes — and the sentence of 12 months of probation with no community service required to be absurd. We find the remarks by Judge Scott Evans of Dauphin County to be deeply troubling, reflecting a degree of deferrence we doubt any of us truly wish to see generally extended to criminals. Ruminations about the “public service” of a man pleading guilty to actions that will almost certainly leave the city with years of tough choices about cuts to public services and increases to property tax millage rates are frankly disrespectful to the residents paying those taxes.

As we chastise the judge and other public officials for this failure to take Nichols’ crimes seriously, we must acknowledge our own shortcomings.

When Nichols’ service as finance director ended in 2020, we wrote an elaborate chronicling of his career and his public service. We proceeded with this article even though there clearly were questions — serious questions — about his management of the city’s finances. While we do not fault the reporter and we still believe the article certainly was well-written, our decision as editors to assign a tallying of his “accomplishments” five years ago, when we fully knew there were concerns about mismanagement, helped craft this narrative — this fiction — of selflessness and altruism.

We regret that we failed to exercise more discernment about a public official and that we fell short in our role in holding our city government accountable. We can only continue, as we have tried since then, to perform this role better.

And we can hope other public officials, inside and outside our court system, can treat offenses by public servants as critically and seriously as they treat those by men and women outside of their proverbial club.