The Honolulu Liquor Commission is undergoing a long-awaited housecleaning and re-evaluation of purpose after years of corruption and long-simmering public distrust.

There are some heartening signs. Wallace Weatherwax, the administrator during the dark days, stepped down and soon will be replaced. And the commission plans to boost accountability through an ombudsman hired to oversee complaints against the agency.

And there are solid plans for conducting planned operations to gather intelligence on problem establishments before enlisting police in the bust. That approach will surely prove more productive than the unsupervised "spot-checks" that have led to so much trouble in the past.

All these improvements and more are needed to restore public trust and dispel the lingering specter of scandal, including the fraud convictions of eight former investigators.

But the embattled agency is still hovering over the notion of blurring the lines separating its investigators' duties from those of police officers. Commission chairman Dennis Enomoto said there's been no firm commitment to arm the investigators, but the possibility of doing so later has been enshrined within the agency's new strategic plan.

Commission leaders still haven't made a convincing case for giving their inspectors guns, saying that they don't intend to turn investigators into quasi-cops. But when firearms are unnecessarily injected into the potentially explosive environment — in this case, local bars where problems have erupted — the danger for violence clearly escalates.

One rationale for arming investigators is not only for their own protection, but also as a way to enhance the professional stature of the job. That's illogical. Police, far better trained with firearms in particular, have enough trouble shouldering this responsibility, and they would not be helped by apprentices toting guns.

Officials acknowledge that the agency hasn't sufficiently distanced itself from its troubled past to be given the burdensome privilege of bearing firearms. And they're right. It seems doubtful that the public would ever support the idea.