Pennsylvania's General Assembly is known to be the largest and one of the most-expensive legislatures in the nation. It's also known that our state lawmakers employ more staffers than any other state in the nation, except New York.

Now voters are seeing at least one possible explanation as to why Pennsylvania state lawmakers require such large staffs — in more than a few cases, the staffers also serve as campaign workers.

For obvious reasons, paying legislative staffers with taxpayers' dollars for partisan campaign work is wrong. It also is illegal. Yet, the latest evidence suggests that the practice was quite common in Harrisburg, most notably among House Democrats in the 2006 elections.

An ongoing investigation by state Attorney General Tom Corbett has already revealed evidence suggesting such a scheme. Corbett is also looking into allegations that some Republicans linked year-end bonuses to campaign work, but the 2006 House Democrats' bonus total of $1.9 million dwarfs the bonuses of the three other caucuses.

Last weekend, a Pittsburgh newspaper reported that some 31,000 e-mails reveal bonus-related discussions among Democratic House staffers, most of them managed by former House Minority Whip, Mike Veon, D-Beaver, who lost his re-election bid.

An internal inquiry ordered by House Majority Leader H. William DeWeese, D-Greene, recovered the e-mails, which had been deleted from the users' computers. An automatic archiving system allowed the recovery of the e-mails that people thought they had deleted.

According to the newspaper's report, none of the e-mails it reviewed suggest DeWeese was aware of the bonus program that rated the election work of staffers and assigned bonuses accordingly.

Corbett's investigation should provide more illumination about what DeWeese did or didn't know regarding the bonus scheme.

Recovered e-mails indicate the practice had been going on for several years. In the tens of thousands of e-mails, a rating system was described that labeled staffers as "rock stars," "good"or "OK,"based on their work in the field, helping with Democratic election efforts.

The massive quantity of e-mails that were thought to have been deleted suggests people trying to cover their tracks. A similar effort had reportedly been planned for paper records relatd to campaign work, but the attorney general's office was warned of the planned destruction of the documents, and as a result, boxes of paper records were seized in a late-summer raid of the Democratic Office of Legislative Research.

From the earliest reports, the allegations of bonus payments for political work looked solid. Newspaper investigations found a strong linkage between those receiving the largest bonuses and those doing the most re-election and campaign work or those donating money to campaigns. Then there was the seizure of documents from the research office, and now thousands of e-mails are recovered describing a rating system for campaign work and discussing dollar amounts fpr bonuses.

Corbett's investigation is ongoing and it appears likely that it could result in indictments and possibly convictions. In some cases, those legal actions could remove some lawmakers from office, thus helping the stalled reform movement in Harrisburg.

A record number of incumbents were replaced by voters in 2006. Fallout from the bonus investigation could fuel another wave of anger over lawmakers demonstrating more interest in their own personal, financial and political priorities than for their constituents' concerns. And that could lead to more new faces coming to Harrisburg, committed to changing the culture from one dominated by self-serving career politicians to public servants interested in working for the people who elected them.