Why does anyone care about Viola Plummer? Her comments and employment status certainly have provided ample grist for blogs and television segments, press conferences and newspaper articles, as people struggle to figure out whether and where to limit speech, who is empowered to fire staff and how much to engage in a picked fight.

A lot of the credit or blame for this situation, also the concern of a pending lawsuit, rests with City Council Member Charles Barron, a deft rabble rouser who has mastered the art of intensifying battle. Some—perhaps as much—has to do with Council Speaker Christine Quinn, who seems to have been initially caught unprepared for the carefully stoked firestorm, what with her lawyers demanding Plummer sign a code of behavior which seems to violate the spirit, if not the letter of the First Amendment. Some, clearly, goes to Plummer herself, with her shifting rationale for what she meant by saying of Quinn ally and Queens Council Member Leroy Comrie, “If it takes an assassination of his ass, he will not be borough president in the borough where I live,” and her refusal to admit that she could, perhaps, have chosen a more productive way to discuss her outrage at Comrie over his role in the Sonny Carson street-naming debate. Barron and Plummer brushed off the crux of the threat, made only a few feet from a chamber which not so long ago witnessed the actual assassination of Council Member James Davis.

Overlooking the political undercurrent would be foolish. Barron, a former Black Panther, has built his entire political persona on exactly these sorts of fights, and officially announced his candidacy for Brooklyn borough president in the midst of the arguments. Quinn, who is looking to build her appeal beyond being a liberal, openly gay Manhattan Democrat as she prepares to run for mayor, surely scored points in the minds of many more conservative voters for taking on Barron.

All of them are using Plummer—and none more so than Plummer herself. They provide such easy and perfect foils for each other as they look toward 2009 that one could be forgiven for thinking that this whole situation had been hatched by their political consultants.

But however we got here, we are here.

Are we to believe that Plummer and Barron would be so blasé about a threat to one of their political allies? Would they be so eager to brush past an assassination suggestion directed at Barron himself? Would they really have joined the rallies to reinstate the job of the person who said it?

Of course not.

Nor will Quinn now make every Council employee sign a conduct code, nor will she continue to enforce the Council floor access restrictions she and her staff remembered just in time to kick Plummer out of the July 25 stated meeting. The many police officers contracted for that task did not even pretend to check anyone else's credentials—the most visible, but far from the only, demonstration of the conveniently inconsistent standards to which Quinn gave lip service in her response. For that meeting at least, she could have had the police check everyone else in the chamber and toss those who did not have the right credentials.

This matters. By revealing how easily interested parties were able to cherry-pick the supposedly universal rules to suit their own ends, the situation lays bare the need to create a proactive, signed, stricter, enforceable code of conduct so that everyone knows what counts as appropriate behavior and what can be done for those who do not practice it. The issue of speech restrictions is a thorny one, and must be treated seriously by all those involved, with very careful review by lawyers. Everyone should be clear on the procedures for hiring and firing and suspending, and establish clear, enforceable conduct standards for all those on the government payroll.

This started with race, but has revealed a much deeper problem. Getting distracted by what sparked the debate would be a huge mistake. After all, imagining what happens when clear codes of conduct remain lacking is not hard: they call it Albany.