Half the mystery behind the funding of those opposing the Compact for Maine’s Forests has been cleared up. Jonathan Carter, leader of the Forest Ecology Network and an opponent of the compact, can answer the other half by clarifying fair questions about a recent election filing.

S. Donald Sussman of Greenwich, Conn., announced Saturday that he was the person behind the recent $150,000 donation. Mr. Sussman runs an investment partnership called Paloma Partners, with $1.5 billion in assets. Until this weekend, he had chosen to remain anonymous, putting Mr. Carter — a vocal advocate for campaign-finance reform — in the unusual role of defending a faceless, out-of-state company.

Now they can finish this issue and bring the focus back to forestry by explaining how the campaign knew in September that the advertising money was coming, but did not report the contribution on the last filing at the end of that month. Maine’s campaign laws require that pledged as well as received money be reported. And it is understandable that an investment manager of means would want to spend money on a cause he believes in, but why hide behind lawyers and a corporation?

It is important to clear up this issue because more money is rolling into the anti-compact campaigns. Mr. Sussman’s new political-action committee has assets of approximately $580,000 and has prepared new ads through Public Media Center of San Francisco. The ad currently being shown, designed through a Massachusetts firm, urges Mainers to reject the compact because it is too hard for them to figure out. Whether Maine residents are bright enough to read a forestry bill should not be the focus of the campaign. Nor, for that matter, should campaign funding sources.

There are important forestry issues to be debated: well-intentioned residents on all sides of this question want to talk about what the compact would or would not do. That does not mean the state should ignore the hundreds of thousands of dollars being spent to defeat it. Instead, opponents need to answer the remaining questions and move the debate back to the forests.