Herald Staff

Blood is thicker than water. In Lula Rodriguez's case, blood also has proven to be thicker than sound judgment. Ms. Rodriguez, a top aide to U.S. Attorney General Janet Reno, is a person known in South Florida political circles for her integrity. For several years she was a trusted aide here for U.S. Sen. Bob Graham. Now she works for Ms. Reno in Washington, where she performs various exacting duties well. But Ms. Rodriguez's sister, Angela, happens to be the wife of Hialeah Mayor Raul Martinez . Martinez is a convicted felon who is appealing his sentence.

For that reason, Ms. Rodriguez had an unfortunate lapse in her normally sound judgment when she spent part of the weekend before the Hialeah runoff election helping her sister at Martinez's campaign headquarters. There, she says, she answered calls for her sister and witnessed signatures on 10 to 12 absentee ballots.

This, by itself, does not mean that Ms. Rodriguez did anything wrong. But investigators are looking into allegations of absentee- ballot fraud in the runoff. Martinez won most of the absentees to defeat Nilo Juri by just 273 votes.

Ms. Rodriguez concedes that by helping her sister, hence Raul Martinez , she reflected badly on Ms. Reno. It's the attorney general's investigators who are looking into the Hialeah voting.

Belatedly, Ms. Rodriguez also recognizes that her role on Ms. Reno's staff freights her every action with consequences that she didn't consider when, however innocently, she helped in Martinez's campaign.

Yesterday afternoon Ms. Rodriguez was on the verge of resigning, anguished over the harm that she fears she has caused the attorney general. Then, early last evening, she said that No, she would stay on.

That's the right decision. Lula Rodriguez did something uncharacteristically dumb. She says so herself. But there's no evidence, or even allegation, that she did anything illegal.

So she should stay with Ms. Reno. And from now on, she should stay far, far away from anybody's election campaign.