Last Monday, the members of Congress from Maine told the Base Realignment and Closure Commission the military doesn’t appreciate how efficient the Portsmouth Naval Shipyard is, nor does it grasp the backlog on overhauling submarines. Tuesday, they filled the commission in on the crucial role of the Brunswick Naval Air Station for maritime patrol and homeland security. Wednesday was DFAS – the Defense Finance and Accounting Service in Limestone that the Defense Department failed to understand was cost efficient and plenty secure.

Then they told BRAC to test them with some questions. They altered a graphic and tweaked a speech and double checked the time for each presentation.

That was the dress rehearsal. “BRAC” actually was congressional staffers, and the delegation – Sens. Olympia Snowe and Susan Collins; Reps. Tom Allen and Mike Michaud – stopped now and then to critique each other’s presentations, slicing away redundancy, emotion-laden rhetoric and various threads of inaccuracy to construct the state’s best case for the military facilities. New Hampshire’s delegation was there for the Portsmouth argument as they and the governors of both states have been throughout the preparation.

Nothing like a triple death sentence to focus the mind and the political body. The real show is this Wednesday at the Boston Convention Center.

In all three decisions to close or drastically reduce the facilities here, Defense was wildly wrong, the delegation not only charges but assures it will demonstrate. Instead of following the criteria for preserving bases of high military value, the Pentagon “had preconceived notions for an arbitrary budgetary decision,” says Sen. Snowe. According to Sen. Collins, it had similar flaws on cost analysis.

For instance, Portsmouth can perform work twice as fast as the three other submarine yards, reducing backlogs and increasing readiness. How is this measured in the closure decisions? It isn’t, the delegation says. How is the increased backlog at the other bases measured if Portsmouth is closed? Not there. And by working at or near capacity the remaining bases could not accommodate a surge in demand, a criterion added specifically to this round of closures.

Or take Brunswick. According to the Defense plan, it will remain open but its airplanes and crews will be sent to Florida, from which they will patrol the North Atlantic, a three-hour security delay when minutes matter. And Washington knows they matter, which is why since 2000 Brunswick has received $120 million in upgrades, including a new runway and tower, new housing and facilities for the next generation of P-3 planes that are there now.

DFAS in Limestone makes even more sense to keep open. In the Defense Department scorebook, it lost points for not being securely on a military base, but it is on a former base that still has a guarded entrance, a perimeter fence and buffer zone. Bottom line economically – this is about accounting, after all – the Pentagon’s consolidation plans for DFAS measured only the aggregate savings of merging most of the facilities at three major centers. But running the numbers on each of the facilities compared with the merged services shows Limestone to be considerably less costly. If anything, it should be gaining work instead of losing it.

So there you have it: substantial deviations from the criteria established for this painful process and strong military and cost arguments for Maine to keep its facilities open. The BRAC commission is going to hear similar cases countless times as it travels the country this summer, some of which will be mere local loyalty, but if the Maine delegation is right about the serious mistakes in the Pentagon’s analyses, that crescendo of protest is much more than that.

It is not possible that in the decision to close 33 major bases, reduce 29 more and eliminate hundreds of small installations, Defense erred only when looking here. If any delegation can demonstrate the Defense Department fixed the facts around the policy of saving money regardless of military value, the entire BRAC round is suspect. That is a difficult idea for Congress to consider before Sept. 8, the day the commission reports its findings to the president.

The alternative, however, is worse because the alternative is to close bases with high military value. “The only way our enemies can succeed is if we forget the lessons of September the 11th,” President Bush said earlier this week. “For the sake of our nation’s security, this will not happen on my watch.” Good. One of the lessons of Sept. 11 was that the speed, jointness, knowledge and precision endorsed for the military by Secretary Rumsfeld should not be limited to fighting wars but should permeate the military, including in the shipyards and airfields it chooses to preserve, and in the process it uses to preserve them.

The presentation Maine makes Wednesday in Boston is important for this state and it is crucial to the value of the BRAC process. If the delegation can knock holes in Defense’s arguments the way it says it can, the whole thing should fall down.

Todd Benoit is the editorial page editor of the Bangor Daily News.