It would be nice to think that people do not need laws to govern what should be common sense. But any number of laws are passed by Virginia’s legislature each year to outlaw behavior that average citizens already know they shouldn’t display. Virginia’s new law banning texting while driving is a prime example.

Considering the unfolding revelations of lavish gifts accepted by Gov. Bob McDonnell and his family and by Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli from the CEO of a company at the center of federal and state investigations, the commonwealth’s top elected leaders are apparently not immune to the problem.

Virginia’s weak ethics laws do not bar such gifts as the $18,000 worth of free meals and lodging Cuccinelli received from Star Scientific CEO Jonnie R. Williams Sr. or the $25,000 in costs paid for McDonnell’s daughters’ weddings by the same man or even the $70,000 in unsecured loans to a real estate company owned by the governor and his sister. And there was no state law that would have kept the governor from accepting a $6,500 Rolex from Williams.

Common sense — not to mention basic propriety — should have kept all of the recipients from accepting any of those gifts, but as with texting and driving, people in all walks of life commonly ignore common sense.

Legislators around the commonwealth are nearly unanimous in their stated desire — at least now that the gifts are common knowledge, and constituents are expressing their alarm — for stronger ethics laws to be enacted to codify what should have been obvious to everybody from the start. The question, twisted up in the political ramifications of a contentious gubernatorial race in which Cuccinelli represents the Republican Party, is when that legislation should be discussed.

For his part, Cuccinelli has asked the governor to convene a special session of the Virginia General Assembly, possibly as early as August, so legislators can deal with the issue outside the normal rush of the annual session, which begins in January. But the attorney general has given up any moral high ground he might have occupied regarding the issue by refusing to return or pay back those gifts.

McDonnell has apologized for accepting the gifts and promised to return them and repay the debts. For some reason, Cuccinelli refuses to do so. Perhaps he is worried that his opponent, Terry McAuliffe, would use the occasion to attack his ethics. But in a political campaign that already has attracted millions of dollars in contributions from outside Virginia, Democrats are already using Cuccinelli’s refusal to return gifts as purported evidence of the same thing.

Cuccinelli can still remove some of the tarnish the whole mess has added to his image by leading an effort to reform Virginia’s weak ethics laws and doing so quickly, rather than postponing the effort to a busy regular legislative session. But he cannot be at the front of that effort without acknowledging that he made a perceptual mistake — if, under the existing law, not a legal one — by accepting Williams’ largess in the first place and then taking the obvious step to put things right.

It’s time for some common sense.