Paul Violette, the disgraced former executive director of the Maine Turnpike Authority, has yet to stand before a judge and receive his punishment for helping himself to public money when he was supposed to be in public service.

That will come on Feb. 6, when Violette is scheduled to plead guilty to felony theft, a crime for which he faces up to five years in prison under a plea agreement with the Attorney General’s Office.

The penalty could be steep, but it will not include the forfeiture of his Maine state pension, which will pay him $63,432 a year for the rest of his life. No matter how heavily he is punished in court, he will still live better than most of the people who will be paying for his retirement.

In the big scheme of things, Violette’s crimes are by no means the worst we have seen. Nobody was killed or injured, and there is no indication that his propensity to let the rest of us pay for his foreign travel, luxury hotels and restaurants, and even a tuxedo ever got in the way of the operations of his quasi-public agency.

But at a time when the state is considering cutting programs that help people in need, writing a $5,288 check every month to someone who misused the public trust is galling. While eliminating Violette’s pension wouldn’t save even one program in the Department of Health and Human Services budget, it hurts to think he may still be collecting while people who have done nothing wrong will do without.

And it doesn’t help to hear that Violette’s pension will be used in part to pay restitution for his theft. That means the victims of the crime will be paying him money so he can pay the same victims back.

Yes, Maine should have a pension forfeiture law like 20 other states to protect itself from this kind of embarrassing situation. And yes, as state Sen. Roger Katz points out, it is good news that situations like this are so rare that we didn’t think we needed to be protected from them. Maine is lucky to not have the culture of corruption that plagues so many other states, and it is something that we should rightfully be proud of.

But it is still hard to feel satisfied with the final result of this affair when someone who admits to stealing from the people will end up better off than so many of them and at their expense.