St. Maries’ veins about tapped out. The Environmental Protection Agency has proved you can squeeze some blood out of a turnip.

During the past half-dozen years, the city of St. Maries, Idaho, has spent $300,000 on legal fees and preliminary work to clean up creosote-soaked soil on four of its acres – money the small town could ill afford to blow. Unfortunately, the creosote is moving toward the St. Joe River again, despite a 1999 project that removed 200 tons of contaminated soil.

Now, the EPA is considering a range of options, from leaving the site alone to full-scale cleanup, with price tags ranging from $4 million to $67 million. At $67 million, every man, woman and child in the town of 2,600 would owe $25,769. The EPA, of course, isn’t going to drop the full responsibility for the cleanup on the town.

If it did, it might find the blood needle on the St. Joe turnip riding on empty.

Political circus didn’t need one more ring. A Thurston County judge ruled this week that an effort to recall Secretary of State Sam Reed can’t move forward. The allegations presented by Martin Ringhofer and Linda Jordan aren’t sufficient to allow a signature drive meant to send Republican Reed’s fate to the ballot, Superior Court Judge Chris Wickham ruled.

Washingtonians should thank him for that demonstration of sanity.

Republican Dino Rossi is seeking a new vote in his contest against Democratic Gov. Christine Gregoire. He’s doing so in the proper arena, the courts.

Ringhofer and Jordan, however, pursued a different strategy that would have set a troubling precedent – rallying political pressure to punish public officials who discharge their duties in good faith but produce controversial outcomes. Whatever errors occurred in the Nov. 2 election, they fell far short of malfeasance on Reed’s shoulders. The threshold for removing a popularly elected official from office should be high. Thanks to Wickham for affirming that.