For now, Mike and Sharon Balser are Maine’s most famous husband and wife. Soon, and for all the wrong reasons, they may become its most famous estranged couple.

The Balsers, of Springvale, both are in their mid-40s and both are disabled due to a variety of ailments — diabetes, asthma, heart problems, kidney disease. They live entirely on supplemental Social Security, Medicaid (her monthly medical bills alone top $1,600) and other assorted welfare benefits. They knew going into their marriage last November that their combined SSI income of $1,065 a month would put them about $160 above the household limit for Medicaid eligibility, they knew the “spend down” feature that allows people who slightly exceed income levels to continue to receive benefits was beyond their means. They just figured they’d find some way around the regs, a loophole.

They didn’t, so now they have a choice to make: Stay married, stay together and go broke; or pretend to split up and continue to collect. The first option apparently is out, so the sham is on.

They’ve ruled out getting a divorce and living together; their marriage vows are too sacred for anything so bogus, albeit legal. Instead, they plan to separate and establish discrete residences a few blocks apart, of which one will be little more than a mail drop for the government check.

The Balsers are far from the first to skirt the rules this way, but they may well be the first to do it so openly, with such state, and now national, media attention. It’s a pathetic story — two people, after a lifetime of hard luck, forced apart by heartless bureaucracy — made even more pathetic by the bureaucracy’s complicity.

Medicaid officials know the Balsers are not separating because their marriage is in trouble or because they can’t stand the sight of each other. Officials know it’s a charade, a finagling that allows the Balsers to stay married but to avoid the so-called marriage penalty Congress wrote into the law — the assumption that matrimony brings some cost-of-living efficiencies — and it has the government stamp of approval. In the end, the Balsers found their loophole because Medicaid officials showed them where to look.

If nothing else, this bizarre situation demonstrates the federal schizophrenia regarding marriage. The Immigration and Naturalization Service will investigate and endlessly hound a couple if they even suspect a marriage between an alien an a citizen isn’t genuine; Medicaid will give its blessing to a divorce or separation it knows is fake.

Mike Balser figures he can find a room right nearby the apartment he shares with his bride, something that won’t put too big a dent in his already strapped finances. That would be good. Even better would be for Congress to pass laws that don’t force sick poor people, or government bureaucrats for that matter, to live such lies.