Yet another piece of soiled linen has been added to the stack of dirty laundry piling up at city hall, and this time it involves the upper echelons of the city bureaucracy.

The latest revelations - published in yesterday’s La Presse and broadcast on Radio Canada - concern Robert Marcil, who was, until his abrupt resignation in June, an executive in the city’s public works department.

Last October, it seems, Marcil and his wife spent 10 days touring Italy at the invitation of Joe Borsellino, president of Construction Garnier, a company that did $20.5 million worth of business with the city in 2008-09 alone - much of which Marcil approved. Also along for the trip were Yves Lortie, vice-president of GENIVAR, another company that does business with the city, and Jocelyn Dupuis, who has since resigned under a cloud as director-general of the Fédération de travail du Québec’s construction unions.

Now we understand the temptation. Rome, Siena and Florence - the cities the group visited - are often lovely in mid-fall after the heat and crowds of midsummer have dissipated somewhat. But it’s a temptation Marcil should have most definitely resisted. Someone in his positions should know better.

It’s still not clear who paid for the trip, but that shouldn’t really matter. This kind of intimate hobnobbing between a public official and the entrepreneurs he deals with looks bad and smells worse. Indeed, it seems that during the course of an internal investigation, city officials made it clear to Marcil he had made a serious ethical lapse.

But there are a couple of hopeful signs in this present mess. First, the investigation was launched after Mayor Gérald Tremblay got an email warning him about Marcil’s activities. So someone at city hall understands the notion of ethical standards and has the courage to act on them. Second, the mayor did the right thing by promptly handing the information over to officials for an internal investigation that continues even though Marcil has resigned "to pursue other opportunities."

But this affair, along with nagging questions about Frank Zampino’s yacht voyage, the bloated water-meter contract, the cesspit that is the city’s housing agency, reinforces the need for a clear code of ethics. It’s also almost enough to make you feel sorry for Tremblay, whose hands, as far as we know, are as a clean as a surgeon’s, but who will no doubt be held responsible for the stench come next November’s elections.