The federal government’s rationale in suing the tobacco industry is a little bit reminiscent of words attributed to gangster Willie Sutton. When asked why he robbed banks, he supposedly replied, "Because that’s where the money is."

There is still a lot of money to be wrung out of the tobacco industry, even after it agreed to pay $246 billion — that’s with a "b" — to the states in an out-of-court settlement. Now Washington seems to have decided that it is advisable to cut itself in for a piece of the action. Especially if there is some political benefit to be gained from giving an already scourged dog another kick while it is down.

If nothing else, Attorney General Janet Reno’s timing seems lousy. She announced the lawsuit on a day when a good deal of eastern North Carolina, the heart of the nation’s tobacco industry, was under water and millions of pounds of tobacco lay sodden and spoiled in warehouses and already-hurting tobacco farmers were reeling from the worst disaster ever to befall the state. Couldn’t this latest legal assault have waited a few weeks?

You will find few ardent defenders of Big Tobacco here at The Pilot, and hardly anyone who will dispute the fact — now universally known — that cigarettes will kill you if you smoke them long enough. What should happen to the tobacco industry is that it should wither away and die from lack of demand for its products. People who don’t smoke shouldn’t start, and people who do smoke should stop, and unsold cigarette cartons should gather dust on store shelves, and tobacco companies should be forced by the invisible hand of the marketplace to find more honest work.

Or, since that has failed to happen, perhaps the federal government should outlaw tobacco, the way it has outlawed addictive drugs and the way it attempted to outlaw alcohol early in this century. But nobody can summon the political will to do that. So we are left with the worst of both worlds: You leave tobacco on the market as a perfectly legal product, but you also see how many ways you can find to bash and demonize the people who make it.

There’s just something wrong with that.

The suit accuses the tobacco companies of "racketeering" for having continued to sell cigarettes while suppressing evidence that they are bad for you. To the extent that the companies committed actual fraud, they should be charged under the criminal statutes. But there are reports that the government feared its case wasn’t strong enough for that and so switched to the civil route, where the rules of evidence are less stringent.

In any case, the government’s latest action seems more than a little hypocritical. This is the same government that began warning its citizens of the proven health dangers of smoking in 1964 — and yet continued for decades thereafter to subsidize tobacco growers, encourage the development of tobacco markets overseas, allow smoking on airliners (until relatively recently), reap untold billions in cigarette-tax revenues, and even (for a time) keep putting cigarette packs in military rations.

Makes you wonder who should be suing whom.

Fall: Right on Schedule

Fall, in the not-so-literate words of the poem, has fell. And what a welcome sight — or so far more of a feel — it is.

If there’s any halfway good thing about frightful Floyd, it is that he blew summer right away. It was hot and muggy the day before he came through, and it was cool and crisp the day after he went blustering on his way.

And then last week, just like clockwork, the temperature plunged to nearly 40 on the night before the first day of autumn. Out came the wool blankets as memories of the seemingly endless summer and its brutal 90-degree days quickly faded.

Good riddance.