As if there's not enough to fight about in Middletown, four township supervisors have asked their lawyer to investigate the fifth supervisor. That would be Robert McMonagle.

Now, were McMonagle suspected of stealing from taxpayers or in some other grievous way violating his oath of office, we'd join them in demanding a full accounting of McMonagle's activities. But McMonagle's conduct in office is not the subject of scrutiny. Nor is the incident under investigation all that recent.

Seems that two years ago, about a month after McMonagle narrowly won his first term in office, a lawyer showed up at McMonagle's door to deliver papers regarding a recount of the election. According to a report distributed at last week's supervisors meeting, McMonagle greeted the courier with blue language and a steel blue pistol.

If true, that sort of conduct is unacceptable from a public official, McMonagle's colleagues argue. They want their attorney to send his findings to the state attorney general as well as the state Ethics Commission.

For his part, McMonagle called the account "incomplete and inaccurate."

Either way, we don't see what this has to do with the work of local government. All it does is waste time and resources, and further polarizes an already fractured board.

While we don't think elected officials should conduct themselves like thugs, what ever happened just faded from interest. Although the alleged victim filed an incident report with police, he did not file charges. And he refuses to talk about it now.

We think that's a good position for the supervisors to take. They've been finding plenty of current issues to fight about; they'd better serve citizens by not dredging old ones.