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Improper spending and efforts to intimidate whistle-blowers forced the director of Virginia's Department of Game and Inland Fisheries to resign Tuesday, two months after the chairman of its governing board quit amid the developing scandal.

Their departures are not "trophies" for department critics - the bitter judgment of one board member who had just voted to accept Director Bill Woodfin's resignation. They are the fruits of accountability to citizens who rightly demanded proper stewardship of public resources.

The department, after all, is supposed to serve the state's sportsmen, not its top officials, whose now infamous African safari appeared, at least, to be more a jaunt by some elite hunting club than the work of public servants.

Then-Chairman Dan Hoffler, a wealthy Hampton Roads businessman, ended up covering the cost, but not before the department requested state funding - and Virginia's secretary of natural resources, Tayloe Murphy, had the good sense to turn it down.

Hoffler insisted the safari was a legitimate business trip to observe wildlife management practices. And, in truth, the cost of that and other travel, to conventions, didn't amount to much in the department's overall budget. But the spending, plus questionable charges on state credit cards, was imprudent at a time of tight state revenues that dictated cuts in services to the public.

It struck lower-level employees that way, apparently. Detailed complaints from whistle-blowers about the department chiefs' free-spending ways prompted the state audit that led to Woodfin's resignation. The audit substantiated 24 of 29 allegations made to an employee fraud, waste and abuse hotline.

And it struck Lee and Paulette Albright that way. The Albrights are two citizens who were unhappy when the department closed its fish hatcheries to visitors. The Albrights suspected mismanagement, and they spent a lot of time and money seeking game department documents under the state's Freedom of Information Act.

A lot of the information they obtained is reflected in the audit's findings.

The tools that allow whistle-blowers within government to call attention to possible improprieties and that let citizens on the outside demand public records were used effectively to do their intended job: hold a public agency accountable to the public.

Its own governing board did not perform as well. Gov. Mark Warner should seek to take Murphy's advice and restructure it.