Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s unfortunate decision to use a personal email account for her work at the State Department, and her flimsy defense of it, have added another scandal to the long list of public embarrassments she’s endured in her career. But she isn’t the first government official to use her personal email account for work, and she almost certainly won’t be the last.

The controversy brings to light larger issues of transparency that must be addressed by lawmakers at the federal and state levels. If the head of a Cabinet department can get away with hiding her email records, there’s no telling how many other officials can do the same.

More than a week after the New York Times exposed Mrs. Clinton’s private email account, the former secretary of state announced that she would turn over half of the more than 60,000 emails she had sent from her personal account for State Department work.

The other half, she said, were sent for personal matters. But Americans will have to take Mrs. Clinton’s word for it, because she swiftly deleted all of those emails. She had instructed State Department employees not to use their personal accounts for work, but evidently did not believe that rule applied to her.

The Associated Press has sued the State Department to gain access to Mrs. Clinton’s emails and other records. Because her private account, hosted on a private server at her home in New York, falls within a gray area for federal reporting rules, it’s unclear whether she’ll ever have to turn over all of her email records for independent review.

Considering the State Department’s lousy record on transparency, that seems unlikely. The department, along with nine other federal agencies, was given a failing grade for public disclosure compliance by the nonpartisan Center for Effective Government this month.

Mrs. Clinton’s private account may seem particularly egregious, amid accusations that she used it to suppress communications during the Benghazi scandal in 2012. But many other public officials, including former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush and Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker — both of whom slammed Mrs. Clinton for evading public records laws — have used private email accounts in office.

Part of the problem stems from the inadequacy of public-records laws, most of which were written in an age of paper communications and don’t accommodate the complexities of online communication. Recent changes to the Federal Records Act require federal officials to use government email accounts for work. Had that amendment gone into effect before Mrs. Clinton served at the State Department, the email scandal may have been avoided.

Ohio law requires public officials to retain records of work-related emails, whether they were sent from a private or government account. A better policy would be to require state officials to send all work emails from their government accounts. This is the only way to avoid thorny situations such as the Clinton scandal, and to ensure that all government emails are archived and made available to the public.

Individual state agencies should learn from Mrs. Clinton’s controversy and set strong, unambiguous guidelines for their employees’ email use. If “emailgate” can prod policy makers to create better transparency rules, Mrs. Clinton’s loss may become the public’s gain.

First Published March 16, 2015, 4:00 a.m.