For once it may pay to have a Congress chock full of lawyers acutely sensitive to the arts of obfuscation and misrepresentation. Their presence means that the tobacco industry will be unable to shift the terms of the debate over cigarette costs without someone noticing.

The issue Congress ought to be addressing is how to respond to the tobacco industry’s decades-long practice of marketing their products to children and lying about the health effects of tobacco use. The broad outline of all settlements has the industry paying for some of the added health care costs brought about by smoking, restraints on how the product is marketed and a limit to liability for the tobacco companies.

When the combination of these issues worked out favorably for the industry, it was sincerity itself in trying to complete an agreement. A new day had risen at Philip Morris and R.J. Reynolds; they promised to stop trying to poison the nation’s kids. But when the Senate produced plans that shifted the numbers in the health costs and liability portions of the agreement, Tobacco returned to its nasty habits and began attacking anything even remotely associated with the agreement.

To understand how nasty they can be one needs only to look at the industry’s recent history, reported this week, on concealing the dangers and addictiveness of cigarettes. But industry execs, who should be ashamed of themselves, don’t want to talk about this. Instead, they issue a non sequitur via a full-page newspaper ad that tries to talk the public out of pricing ciagarttes out of the reach of children. “Think about it,” part of one ad says, “In a time when we have a budget surplus of up to $75 billion, a huge new tax increase to fund more federal spending.” Get it? The tobacco settlement is not about stopping an industry from getting away with murder, it’s about the size of government.

The difficult question for congressional Republicans is how far to travel with an old ally as it drives toward a cliff. President Clinton took an easy shot at Republicans this week over an ill-considered defense of Joe Camel by Speaker Newt Gingrich. Democrats can do that right through the next election unless Republicans distance themselves from their reliable campaign funders in the tobacco industry.

Fortunately, Republicans have a tobacco package drafted by one of their own, Sen. John McCain, that ignores distractions by the industry and presents a good start to an agreement of substance. Maine Sens. Olympia Snowe and Susan Collins early on chose to support real reform on this issue. Their colleagues also need to quit defending this industry and get on with the real subject of stopping the sale of this product to children.