A messy quarrel between the American Lung Association and its Northwest affiliate is complicated by significant factual disputes, but everyone should be able to agree with one assertion by Laird Harris, chairman-elect of the regional association.

Rather than going to court, he said, the spat should have been “settled in the family.”

Indeed. Instead, though, the ALA filed a suit against the American Lung Association Northwest, claiming that the regional entity violated its agreement with the ALA, which now wants the Northwest organization’s assets.

Mostly, the national headquarters objects to events surrounding a new organization, the Pacific Northwest Lung Cancer Foundation, which was formed by three people including Mike Alderson, who is also the new president of the ALA’s Northwest affiliate.

The regional affiliate was under pressure from national headquarters to grow, through a series of mergers, and to beef up its operating budget despite declining success of traditional fundraising methods. Alderson was known for fundraising skills and his new group was seen as a source of funding for area lung-health programs, to include those of the financially strapped ALA Northwest.

In the process, ALA Northwest donated $600,000 to Alderson’s new group and sold it its building for a token sum. ALA Northwest was to get free rent for up to five years and be freed of all maintenance and repair costs.

That’s not the way donors expected their dollars to be used, contends the national organization, while Harris says almost all the funds involved were acquired before 1986, the year the regional and national lung associations formally linked. A spokesman for the national headquarters contends that the affiliation actually goes back a century.

It’s curious that so fundamental a point could be in dispute, but it’s central to the ALA’s concerns about “donor intent.”

That said, we have to wonder if donors, regional or national, intended their contributions to be spent on lawyers and lawsuits.