Eddie, the comic innocent, represents the virtues that require martial defense in a world in which the author of evil freely sows temptation, even among those sworn to do good. The last scene shows Jack blowing the candles out on a birthday cake that Eddie has made for him and on which Eddie has spelled out in icing a list of people who have changed for the better, including Eddie, Jack, and Barry White. It's not a birthday cake, of course, but a rebirthday cake. By saving Eddie, Jack has saved himself.
Eddie doesn't have to die to redeem Jack, which is another sign you're in the pre-modern realm of romance, the genre that fulfills the audience's wish for a hero capable of fantastically effective action against the spiritual Enemy. In a modern movie set among figures serving the executive branch of a democratic government, this is a bad fit. What makes romance great, when it is great, is that it's a symbolic demonstration of deeply and widely held spiritual values.
The problem here is that the values according to which Jack is reborn aren't spiritual, really, they're political, and thus more amenable to reasoned debate than spiritual parable. When Frank defends himself in the subterranean parking garage of the court house (here the symbolic pits that lie beneath true justice) by saying that he covered up the accidental death of a witness he was intimidating because the guy was going to blow an otherwise legitimate case, his point of view is not Satanic, it's pragmatic in a way that offends our civilized notions of fair play, and our republican wariness of unbridled government actors, both of which underlie our procedural restrictions on the state's police power.
Frank's attitude is the converse of the view that it's better to let a guilty man go free on a technicality than to subvert the rights of the accused, and I imagine his attitude has a gut appeal to a lot of people. We resist this appeal, however, because we also understand the arguments in favor of separating the functions of investigation and enforcement on the one hand and adjudication on the other. We don't want the cops evaluating the evidence produced by their own work and deciding which witnesses will be heard by the tribunal.
It's too easy to imagine that a combined police-judicial department could achieve a 100% conviction rate at the expense of the "niceties" of procedure and would lead on a regular basis to what we see in 16 Blocks — the self-protecting murder by cops of a witness for the greater good of fighting crime. Unlike followers of a totalitarian regime, we don't want the state to win at any cost just because it's the state.
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