Doing good is important, but it's usually not enough.

The best of motives, the most noble of causes, may be noteworthy on some grounds -- but not nearly sufficient if the public trust and public funds are involved.

When well-meaning and well-intentioned people run afoul of that reality, it is sad. But the need for accountability is inescapable.

Hence, the unfortunate ending of an 11-year effort by a partnership between the Durham County Department of Social Services and local faith communities operating as Congregations in Action.

Earlier this year, Durham County shut down the partnership and terminated the minister, the Rev. Pebbles Lindsay-Lucas, charged with operating the program. Many, including us, were grieved by what seemed a budgetary decision to end a respected program.

Now comes an auditor's report that says that, however noble it may have been, the program was a failure.

Lindsay-Lucas did good, an auditor found, but she did not do it well.

"All the work was supposed to be done by the congregations," county audit director Richard Edwards said in a report to the Board of Commissioners on Monday. But, he concluded, "the program never got to that."

It was not that good things didn't happen, Edwards wrote. Lindsey-Lucas "worked hard and diligently through the years, but the program never got to the point where congregations were dealing with large number of clients."

Meanwhile, the county was funneling more than $600,000 into the effort.

The Department of Social Services, in Edwards' findings, compounded the program's meager success by misstating the reasons for its demise. The department, faced with considerable dismay by proponents of the program, said budgetary reasons and shifting federal funds led to its end and Lindsay-Lucas's dismissal.

But Edwards concluded the department had concocted that rationale to cover for the fact it was ending the program because it wasn't living up to expectations.

There are many lessons here on transparency and on accountability with the public's funds. The mission was at best difficult. Obscuring the reasons for its apparent failure did it no service.

Gerri Robinson, who has come on board as social services director since the program ended, told the Durham County Board of Commissioners Monday that the department would "treat this as a lesson well learned."

Well they should. It is this sort of casual dismissal of accountability, whatever the decent intent, that threatens public support of vital government programs to provide a social safety net.