Who cares? For all the focus on campaign donations given New York County District Attorney Cyrus Vance, Jr., for his campaign against no one, nobody outside the crim law community knew or cared who would get the job for life. Unlike Brooklyn, or Houston, there was no pressing demand for reform in Manhattan.

DANY was the premier local prosecutor’s office in the nation, and when Robert Morgenthau decided it was time for him to pass the torch, he handed it to Cy. Morgy was an old-school patrician prosecutor. Cy was his ordained successor. The job is now Cy’s until he decides it’s time to go.

Cy doesn’t need the money personally. Cy doesn’t need the money to run a campaign against anyone. Not since his initial election has anyone mounted a serious campaign against him. It’s not as if he has to run a campaign ad to get some name recognition. As long he doesn’t do something monumentally stupid that puts his name in front of people such that they start to think, “hey, who is this guy who owns the DA’s office,” he will be there forever.

But that happened, if inadvertently. Two lawyers gave Cy’s campaign significant donations, which nobody would have cared about except that their clients are now hated. I could remind you that correlation does not prove causation, but we both know that nobody cares about logical fallacies. As Nancy Grace loved to say, where there’s smoke, there’s fire.

In both situations Mr. Vance had at one point or another accepted campaign contributions from those people’s lawyers. In the Trump case he returned the money when questions about it arose, but the issue of whether there had been a quid pro quo lingered. Some critics accused the district attorney of taking a dive for the rich and powerful in matters that would have had people of lesser influence slapped in handcuffs.

Cy isn’t used to people questioning his integrity. People do not question the integrity of patricians.

Nonsense, Mr. Vance said. Those cases, he said, were dropped solely because lawyers on his staff had concluded that they were not sustainable. The notion that he would end a case for money was “ludicrous,” he said.

That may be true, or not. Or, more likely, partially true, in the sense that run-of-the-mill defendants wouldn’t get a second look, a serious thought, about whether they should be indicted and prosecuted. They can tell it to the judge. Their lawyers don’t get a private meet with Cy. Their cases don’t get second thoughts, reviews, oversight. But that doesn’t mean Cy got bought. That doesn’t mean Cy could be bought.

Perhaps his record of honorable service gives him claim to the benefit of the doubt. But as Mr. Vance belatedly realized, appearances matter, especially for those whose positions give them power to decide other people’s fates. That’s where money not only talks, it shouts.

And this is where it all gets stupid, because the Menckian solution to the optics misses a big issue.

The list of donors is strewn with law firms and individual lawyers. To some extent that’s understandable. They have a special interest, as professionals, in seeing that solid people are elected district attorney.

There are some restrictions he can impose on himself, his campaign, such as refusing donations from lawyers or groups representing parties currently before his office, or restricting the amount of donations so that it falls below an amount that appears “unseemly.” Or the New York Times’ solution:

Maybe a flat-out ban on donations from lawyers ought to at least be considered as well. You never know who among them will plead someday for prosecutorial leniency for a client.

Well, that might address part of the optics issue, at least the one that’s in their face at the moment. But then, what about the donations from the police union? What about the donations from the teachers’ union. The prison guards’ union? What about Goldman Sachs? What about some love from the other politicians’ booty, like the speaker of the Assembly, before his indictment, conviction, reversal and, presumably, retrial? You never know, right?

There is pretty much no one who can’t be in a prosecutor’s crosshairs under the right circumstances, which means there is no one from whom contributions can’t be problematic. Maybe the Pope? Oh wait, pedo priests. Nope, no one.

But if you insist on electing officials whose skills and backgrounds are a mystery to the public, beyond their capacity to intelligently elect, like district attorneys and judges, there is only one group of people with the competence to decide whether they would be competent to do the job. The one group that would be inclined to support the person who would be good and right for the post, because they have to live with him.

This doesn’t mean they won’t spend their money in the hope of some insider benefit. Why else would David Boies care enough who sat in Morgy’s chair to throw over $180,000 his way? But then, who else but a lawyer would know whether Cy had the chops for the job?

Again, appearances matter. As lawyers might say, res ipsa loquitur. The thing speaks for itself.

Appearances do, indeed, matter. So does substance. At least to lawyers, who don’t consider Nancy Grace a pre-eminent legal philosopher.