Workflow of Workbench

I'm wondering whether or not a workbench "state" on the workflow ('published' state) can be "moderated" without the "editing" of the node (of any contentent type). It appears that Workbench requires for the USER ROLE to have Editing previleges on Nodes --for the moderation to be executed and we just want to moderate the node without "editing" the content. We don't want the publisher to be able to edit content. But when we take editing privileges away from the publisher they are no longer able to moderate content(even able to view the moderation state). Can it be configured to the "Node level" are of each content type we need. The nodes will be created by Content Manager, so the Project Management Role will have access to edit those nodes and change the moderation status to "Published" or any states that workbench has configured.