All's well that ends, period

For all the hullaballoo over the discovery of discarded school papers in the old Evans Middle School building, the end of the investigation is just so much fizzle.

That's exactly how it should be.

To recap the case, some Columbia County teens poked around in the old building, which was wide open to curious and destructive kids in the three weeks since the new school opened.

No one took much effort to secure the building during that time while workers salvaged equipment and hauled off garbage from the abandoned school. That gave kids an attractive, if ill-advised, playground.

In the course of the Evans Middle move, discarded papers containing names, Social Security numbers and other identifying information of students and teachers were left behind; teens found the papers and took them to their moms, and a couple of women took the documents to School Superintendent Tommy Price.

The place probably would have been (belatedly) cleaned up without fanfare, but another mom took some of the papers to a radio reporter in an attempt to embarrass school officials.

It certainly worked, but Price compounded the embarrassment by threatening to prosecute the roving teens.

They shouldn't have been in the building. But prosecution seemed to be nothing more than a petulant response to the irresponsible mom's public "gotcha."

Fortunately, the Columbia County Sheriff's Office conducted their investigation quickly, and pronounced the teapot tempest at an end - with no prosecution.

Those whose identities might have fallen into the hands of the criminally mischievous still will need to monitor their credit reports. But that's a precaution everyone should take these days.

And, certainly, school officials will need to be far more careful about what's left lying around. Remember: it took skilled, determined hackers to crack into the county government's Web site this past week; custodians of sensitive records shouldn't make the job any easier by being sloppy.