The most significant thing about disgraced former SCANA CEO Kevin Marsh’s recent return to the news wasn’t that he was sentenced to two years in federal prison.

Yes, that’s important to all those people who believed that there’s no corporate accountability and that SCE&G, Santee Cooper and electric co-op ratepayers would pay the full cost of the $9 billion V.C. Summer nuclear plant debacle. Who knows? Maybe the sentence will restore their faith in the justice of our criminal justice system. It also could send a message to other white-collar criminals who might find it tempting to lie to regulators, investors and business partners.

But a prison sentence, while subject to judicial approval, was part of the deal Mr. Marsh cut last year with state and federal prosecutors when he agreed to plead guilty for his role in South Carolina’s biggest-ever corporate failure.

The most significant thing about his return to the news was the history and accountability lesson that prosecutor Creighton Waters presented last week in state court, before Mr. Marsh was sentenced to serve a state sentence concurrently with the federal sentence.

Mr. Waters, who runs the State Grand Jury, likened Mr. Marsh to the proverbial frog in boiling water: He didn’t start out intending to deceive shareholders and government regulators about the problems with the construction project, but he did, and even when he realized that he himself had been misled, he continued to claim the project was on track, because that allowed him to keep drawing hefty bonuses. Yet while he made it clear that Mr. Marsh was ultimately responsible for his actions — as criminals always are — he wasn’t the only one to blame. In fact, corporate executives weren’t the only ones to blame: They were aided and abetted by “the statutory environment and the regulatory environment” in South Carolina that “created a lack of consequence” that combined with the “hubris in the leadership” at SCE&G to produce the debacle that will cost ratepayers for decades.

“How did this happen: How did an otherwise … good man go astray?” Mr. Waters asked the court rhetorically. “A part of that was the statutory regime that was set up. That would be the Base Load Review Act, the BLRA. It used to be that before a power company could start to bill its customers, a plant had to be up and running and generating power. And the problem was that the financial markets, Wall Street, did not want to pay to build a nuclear power plant, because the risk was too high.

“So what was the solution? The solution was to pass a statute, the BLRA, that allowed the power company to, instead of putting that risk on Wall Street, to put that risk on Everyday Joe and Everyday Jane, the ratepayers. … And that sort of environment created a situation where it divorced the risk from the people that were spending the money. The way the statute is set up, … you won if you lost. If the project was a failure, if you abandoned it, you still got to recoup that cost from the customers, as well as rate of return on top of that.”

Fortunately, the Legislature repealed the Base Load Review Act after SCE&G and Santee Cooper abandoned the two nuclear reactors mid-construction in 2017. Lawmakers also changed a contemporaneous law that had stripped the state’s consumer advocate of the right to represent ratepayers in utility rate cases and had required the new Office of Regulatory Staff to put the interests of monopoly utilities ahead of the interests of ratepayers — something the Public Service Commission had always done quite well on its own. And, at least for the moment, lawmakers are electing PSC commissioners who recognize that their job is to act in the absence of the normal free-market economy to protect ratepayers who by state law have no choice about where to purchase their electricity.

But lawmakers haven’t done anything to change their own internal problems that allowed the Base Load Review Act to pass unquestioned: misplaced trust and inadequate vetting.

Indeed, the Base Load Review Act was the quintessential example of what happens when a really complicated proposal comes from a special interest that has been able to use its campaign donations and stable of lobbyists to cultivate trusting relationships with legislators.

When SCANA asked for a new law to make it easier to get financing to build the nuclear reactors most lawmakers wanted, they didn’t look closely enough to realize that the legislation was built around perverse and guaranteed incentives: The more the company spent, the bigger the profit for the company and its executives — even if the project failed.

We can’t purge that misplaced trust from our entire political system, but ratepayers can stop being forced to subsidize it: In return for the regulated monopoly status that constitutes a virtual money-printing machine, the Legislature should strip regulated monopolies of the right to lobby the Legislature — and strip executives and companies of their right to make campaign donations.

The Legislature also should fill in the information vacuum with a system — similar to the one we have for tax and spending legislation — that delays debate on certain complex bills until they are reviewed for constitutional flaws and explained, in plain English, by neutral experts.