AP Photo by Seth Perlman, February 2003.

I MET ROD BLAGOJEVICH just once. It was March 9, 2007. Twenty-one months later, I don’t know what to think about what I saw and experienced that day.

The Democratic governor of Illinois and several senior members of his staff had come to St. Louis to pitch the Post-Dispatch Editorial Board on a sweeping plan to improve health care and public education in Illinois. He had unveiled its outlines two days earlier in his annual budget address to the Illinois General Assembly in Springfield.

Health and education were (and still are) issues of paramount importance to middle-class and working-class people in Illinois and, for that matter, to Missourians and all Americans.

The various health care proposals Blagojevich described to us would have extended health insurance to all Illinoisans, particularly the 1.4 million people who had none. They also would have provided subsidies to the so-called under-insured: people whose insurance coverage was better than nothing but not good enough to spare their families from financial ruin in the event of a serious medical crisis.

In education, Blagojevich laid out ideas for increasing substantially the state’s share of funding for public school systems, reducing the disparity in per-student spending between wealthy school districts and poor ones, renovating old schools and building new ones.

Blagojevich was a fervent advocate with a populist sheen, quoting everybody from Teddy Roosevelt to FDR, Ronald Reagan and Harry Truman. His hyper-prepared staff, armed with fat briefing books and data on CDs, supplied detailed answers to questions about criteria, coverage and budgeting.

None of our visitors from Springfield and Chicago, least of all Blagojevich, pretended that it would be easy to enact the plan. They readily admitted that opposition — from powerful business lobbying groups bankrolled by major corporations — would be fierce. Blagojevich and his people could produce scads of charts showing that firms doing billions of dollars’ worth of business in Illinois weren’t paying their fair share of taxes and that the people of Illinois were suffering as a result. But those same corporations were well practiced at flexing political muscle and weren’t about to meekly accept increased taxes on their Illinois revenues.

Blagojevich’s grand plan crashed and burned almost immediately, despite the support of education, health care and labor groups. Business organizations launched a counter-campaign that played up the taxes that would finance the plan and ignored the benefits people would receive. State legislators lined up against it. When the Illinois House voted on the principal funding aspect of the plan two months later, the bill failed by a vote of 107-0.

And now, barely a week since Blagojevich was arrested at his Chicago home at the crack of dawn by federal agents and accused of — but not charged with — rampant corruption in office, I wonder whether he believed a word of what he said here last year.

I wonder whether he really cared that Illinois residents were getting sick and dying and families were being forced into bankruptcy for lack of adequate health insurance. I wonder if it mattered to him that kids in poor neighborhoods in his state were getting lousy educations in dilapidated buildings.

I even wonder if he really was angry — he said he was — that it was easy and legal for huge corporations to avoid paying Illinois corporate income taxes, leaving individuals to pick up the slack and leaving the state desperate for money to provide essential services.

Or was it all just so much theater, a performance with an eye toward higher office, a sham for leverage he could use to squeeze political contributions and even gain personal financial advantage out of some of the same companies he was savaging with his impassioned rhetoric.

I’ve read the criminal complaint against Blagojevich and his since-resigned chief of staff John Harris and the supporting affidavit, both filed by FBI Special Agent Daniel Cain. I watched the spell-binding, jaw-dropping press conference held by U.S. Attorney Patrick Fitzgerald last week to announce the arrests of Blagojevich and Harris. I’ve followed the subsequent press coverage and Internet commentary.

Like some of my lawyer friends, I’m concerned that Fitzgerald’s public comments and characterizations went beyond the bounds of prosecutorial propriety. And, like them, I’ve noticed that the criminal complaint is packed with crass, ignorant and venal things Blagojevich and others said but is noticeably thin when it comes to things he did that would make his words the supporting script for criminal conduct. Clearly, Fitzgerald did not have enough evidence as of last week to get Blagojevich indicted by a grand jury — although given Fitzgerald’s track record, it would be unwise to bet against him.

But if we don’t know yet whether Blagojevich is a crook, the public knows now that he is a scheming, petty, self-obsessed man for whom public service is, at best, a secondary concern.

That may be enough for Illinois legislators, who have begun exploring the possibility of impeachment, to remove him from office. Or it may not be.

“There’s generally thought to be a fairly high standard [for impeachable conduct in Illinois],” said Barbara Flynn Currie, the Chicago state representative who is heading the committee looking into impeachment. “That is to say,” she told National Public Radio, “the fact that someone’s a mope probably doesn’t qualify.”

No, but what corrupt politicians do that’s worse than stealing, worse than soliciting and accepting bribes and worse than trading political contributions for official acts in office is poison the public mind. Every sellout and every slimy quid pro quo is like rust eating away at the mechanisms of democracy. Every betrayal gives us a reason to not trust the people we entrust with our democratic institutions, a reason to disregard and dismiss them all.

People start to think: If they’re all corrupt, why does it matter who wins an election? Why bother to vote? Why let yourself believe that Americans and their leaders can come together to plan for the future, take care of folks who need help and make sure the next generation has a fair shot at fulfilling their dreams?

When Blagojevich pitched his health care and education plans to us last year, I listened, I reviewed the supporting materials and I talked to people who know a lot more about such things than I do. I came to believe that what he proposed to do would be good for the people of his state and maybe for my state and my country.

That’s still true, even if Blagojevich really didn’t give a damn about it. And I’ll probably feel the same way about the next man or woman who proposes to do something similar. But I’ll also be even more skeptical than I was before, a little less trusting of the person, if not of the proposal.

For that alone, I regard Blagojevich as despicable, whether he’s committed a crime or not.