We’ve come a long way on earmarks — those special taxpayer-funded expenditures that South Carolina lawmakers like to call “community investments.”

When the Legislature first pushed them under the radar back during the Sanford administration, the chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee spent an entire session taunting Gov. Mark Sanford about funding for a firetruck he had hidden in the budget — something the governor never did manage to locate and veto.

By the time the one-time money that funds them returned in conjunction with Henry McMaster’s ascendency to the governor’s office, budget earmarks were so secretive that most legislators didn’t even know about any earmarks except the ones that the House and Senate budget chairmen had granted to them. Some didn’t even realize that their wistful requests had been granted until they got phone calls from state agency directors asking how they wanted the checks delivered. An essential question because the default practice had become for the legislative sponsor to deliver the check to the recipient, as if it came from that lawmaker’s personal bank account. The dog-and-pony show still comes complete with one of those oversized sweepstakes-style checks that even has the legislator’s name on it.

But Mr. McMaster resumed the Sanford crusade against them — although in a much less grating way. The Post and Courier’s Seanna Adcox and Columbia’s State newspaper invested serious investigative time into unearthing the expenditures and exposing the more egregious ones. And Sens. Wes Climer and Dick Harpootlian launched a campaign from inside the Legislature to clean them up.

It was slow-going at first: Lawmakers routinely overrode Mr. McMaster’s vetoes, voted down the Climer-Harpootlian reform efforts and laughed off — or denounced — the newspaper exposes.

But after more than four years, Ms. Adcox reports, earmarks are just about as exposed as they can get.