When former Gov. Rick Perry announced his intention to run for president in 2016, much of the coverage focused on his legal troubles.

There may be plenty of reasons to oppose Rick Perry for president. His indictment by the Travis County district attorney’s office isn’t one of them.

The Bloomberg news service pointed out that Perry is “one of the few people to formally run for president while under indictment. … Perry, 65, faces two abuse-of-power charges for threatening in 2013 to veto funding for a public-corruption task force if Democratic rival Rosemary Lehmberg, the county district attorney in charge of the unit, didn’t resign following a humiliating drunken driving conviction. She didn’t, so he did.”

Bloomberg doesn’t say exactly how the appallingly arrogant Ms. Lehmberg is Perry’s “rival,” but we’ll let that pass.

The real point here is that the indictment is a shocking abuse of a badly designed system for weeding out corruption. Why is an official elected in Travis County policing the entire state government?

The theory, of course, is that what happens in Austin stays in Austin — that is, crimes committed in the state capital should be prosecuted there.

But what the Travis County Public Integrity Unit has become is a partisan tool of the Democratic Party, unaccountable to anyone outside of that county.

And that’s why the Texas Legislature was right to move the duties of the Public Integrity Unit to the Attorney General’s office.

Opponents of that move claimed it would politicize corruption cases. But that’s exactly what the Travis County unit has already done.

Take the most famous case — the toppling of Congressman Tom DeLay. Travis County DA Ronnie Earle was out to get DeLay. Over a two-year period, Earle took his evidence to eight different grand juries. Earle eventually got his indictment, and a trial followed. He won a conviction in a Travis County courtroom in 2010, but that conviction was overturned by the Third Court of Appeals, which found there was no evidence of wrongdoing, and that DeLay’s political action committee did its best to comply with the law. The court issued a full acquittal.

But DeLay’s political career was over.

In Perry’s case, even news outlets unfriendly to Perry say Ms. Lehmberg is wrong. The New York Times says it appears to be the product of an overzealous prosecution.

Clearly, the system is already politicized. Taking prosecutorial powers from Travis County politicians and giving them to officials elected statewide is a good step. It injects some sorely needed accountability.

Perry should be relieved that most coverage of his brand new campaign acknowledges the weakness of the indictment.

Even that Bloomberg piece admitted, “a bipartisan group of legal scholars told the court: The Texas constitution gives the governor absolute authority to veto any budget item for any reason, and the U.S. Constitution gives him the right to say anything he wants about it.”

Perry’s not a perfect candidate, but that Travis County indictment is ridiculous. It shouldn’t be the focus of questions about his presidential bid.