So now official Washington knows what the taxpaying public has always known — some Internal Revenue Service agents are snoopy, abusive and mad with power.

And what better, or at least more predictable, way for the Beltway to respond to this shocking revelation than to turn a national disgrace into a political tug-of-war. The Republican-controlled Congress wants to take oversight of the agency away from the Treasury Department and place it in the hands of an independent board.

Wrong, says the Clinton Administration. It wants a panel of government officials drawn from the executive branch to ride herd.

But lost amid the horror stories the Senate Finance Committee heard last week from harrassed taxpayers was this tidbit: The hearings were the first time the committee, which has supervisory authority over the IRS, had ever — that’s ever — exercized that authority, despite years of warnings by the General Accounting Office that the IRS was on its short list of federal agencies deserving scrutiny.

In short, the cop on the beat napped on the job. The thugs ran wild, kicking dogs, stealing candy from children, yelling “boo” at the elderly. Now, the cop says it’s not his fault, somebody should have woken him up.

The congressional plan calls for a management board made up of the treasury secretary, the head of the treasury workers’ union and seven citizens, nominated by the president and approved by Congress. No potential for conflict of interest and political favoritism there.

The president’s plan is even worse, and a good bit sillier — an oversight board of White House staffers with a little free time. Who better to keep watch over one of the nation’s most powerful and secretive agencies than a president’s — any president’s — hand-picked cronies?

With two truly bad ideas on the table, surely there’s room for a third, maybe not so bad: How about having the American people elect an elite group of 100 lawmakers to represent them, and from that group have those with special expertise in matters fiscal check up from time to time on the doings of the republic’s tax-collection agency? That select group could be called — let’s see — the Senate has a nice ring to it, and those with fiscal expertise could be the Senate Finance Committee. Nah, it’d never work.