The amazing thing about Andrew Cuomo’s announcement this week that he is stepping down as governor of New York is not that he left office, it is that it took this long for him to resign. And among the most troubling parts of the interminable saga is how many crimes he and New York politicians normalized in the process — because so many of these officials were complicit, too.

Cuomo resigned in the wake of attorney general Tish James’s report detailing his sexual crimes. But here’s the truth that’s hard to say aloud: if the New York governor had not been a sex pest, he likely would have gotten away with hiding thousands of people’s deaths in nursing homes and shielding his health care industry donors from any liability — all while profiting off a $5 million book deal and being venerated by liberals and corporate media outlets as a shining star.

In fact, unless things suddenly change, he will get away with those crimes. With US attorneys so far declining to prosecute Cuomo on those matters — and with New York’s legislature refusing to begin impeachment proceedings on those issues — the federal and state political systems made sure these crimes weren’t considered transgressions at all. Same goes for many New York Democratic voters — a new poll shows that even now, a plurality of them say they approve of the way Cuomo has done his job.