Islamabad, Jan 14 (IANS): The Pakistan government should set its house in order, said a daily as it noted that due to its vacillation and inconsistency "one can never be sure how far away the next crisis is".

An editorial in the News International Saturday said that Prime Minister Yousuf Raza Gilani and President Asif Ali Zardari government's "antics in recent days have threatened to test the limits of the country's troubled experiment with democracy".

"Though sanity seems to have prevailed now after a nerve-racking Wednesday, the fact of the matter is that with vacillation and inconsistency having become the government's only mode of operation, one can never be sure how far away the next crisis is," the editorial said.

It said that Friday's special session which was "called at great expense to the public exchequer and having caused much anxiety to an already stressed public, proved a damp squib".

The editorial described as icing on the cake Gilani's statement: "We are politicians; if we don't make mistakes, who will? But democracy should not suffer for our mistakes."

"Yes, it shouldn't," said the daily.

The editorial went on to say that there is "genuine disillusionment on the ground with both the style and substance of his government because of which democracy has suffered both as an idea and as a process".

"...The government has not had a clear run at being the guardian of the transition to democracy.

"It should set its house in order before its failure truly becomes the miner's canary: a symptom of an even graver failure of democratic politics in this country," it added.