Electeds in the smaller cities of Los Angeles County tout local control as politics at its best. If you’re one of five City Council members in a city of some 72,000 residents, say, right in the middle of the teeming 10 million-people county, you can claim to provide real constituent service right there on the ground.

Citizens and those with business interests in your fair city can shake your hand, kvetch about public safety and potholes, or the regulatory climate. Or, you know, bribe you with an envelope kindly filled with $15,000 in cash. Whichever.

We don’t mean to sound too cynical about the nefarious possibilities for local elected scam artists. Big-city pols get their palms greased with Benjamins, too. But when local control means hundreds of smaller-city politicians have regulatory power over, for instance, whether cannabis stores can open in their jurisdiction, even though the electorate of the entire state of California voted to legalize cannabis sales, that is a recipe for corruption. And cannabis-related corruption is just what is being alleged about local state Sen. Susan Rubio, D-West Covina, from the time she served on the Baldwin Park City Council.

A recently unsealed plea agreement says a state legislator is alleged to have solicited bribes from a cannabis company in Baldwin Park and accepted fraudulent campaign contributions. As our staffer Jason Henry reports, the unnamed state legislator, described as “Person 20” in a plea agreement, matches the description of Rubio, a Baldwin Park councilmember during the time  in question, as someone who had the power to fire the formerly Baldwin Park city attorney and who won a primary for state elected office in June 2018.

Rubio says she is “not a target of the government’s investigation.” But Assemblymember Bill Essayli, R-Corona, is absolutely right to call for an ethics investigation into the senator. There is sufficient evidence for the Legislature’s Ethics Committees “to identify the person described in the plea agreement and to consider any and all appropriate disciplinary action,” as Essayli writes in his request. It’s time to get to the bottom of the claim. And perhaps it’s time to reconsider the ways legal cannabis shops are licensed in California.