The Legislature returns to work today after a well-deserved week of rest and relaxation. On the issue of fingerprinting school personnel, perhaps some reflection as well.

Rarely does something so grounded in good intentions become so swamped by confusion and anger, or a question so clearly in need of facts get hunches for an answer. Never should a matter as important as protecting children from sexual abuse be treated this haphazardly.

The bungling started four years ago, when this law was passed. No money was attached, the implementation was shoved off to what at the time must have seemed like the distant future. The future arrived late last summer when the first batch of school personnel were told to shell out $49 for the privelege of being fingerprinted and having their backgrounds checked.

The initial anger focussed upon the $49. To many school employees, it seemed the ultimate in unfunded mandates — pay to prove you’re fit to do the job you’re already doing. Lawmakers and education officials responded with collective amnesia: They couldn’t recall exactly how a law with such fiscal and civil liberties implications for some 20,000 Maine citizens got passed with so little notice. When the initial objections could easily have been quelled with the simple assurance that the state most certainly would pay for this program, the best school employees could get from Augusta were vague assurances that it would be looked into. Long lines and fingerprinting appointments scheduled on Saturdays certainly didn’t help.

So from that sorry start as an issue of pocketbooks and inconvenience, Maine soon found itself in a full-blown civil liberties battle. As protests grew, the important questions — whatever happened to the presumption of innocence, what background information would be gathered and how would it be used and kept confidential, where was credible evidence that school employees are anything more than a very small part of the entire child abuse problem — were brushed aside with assertions that the need for this program was far too urgent to be delayed.

Obviously, the four-year delay in implementation shreds the urgency argument. Lawmakers had this entire session fix this law and it has not been time well spent. After rest, relaxation and reflection, now it’s time to reconsider.

It seemed, until late in the week before April break, that a compromise would be worked out in which the program would start with only new hires; current employees already printed and checked would be reimbursed, the records would be destroyed. It seemed a reasonable revision, given that one of the central arguments for the program was that, without it, Maine could become a haven for out-of-state pedophiles.

The Senate endorsed that version Thursday of that week. The House did so as well, but changed its mind the next day, the day before recess, and reverted to testing everyone. This was done after state police officials told representatives the FBI said it would not participate in a program that checks backgrounds of only certain employees at the discretion of the employer. State police officials cannot name their FBI source for this information, but say they will have an FBI spokesman available to lawmakers this week. Maine Educators Against Fingerprinting say federal law and statements from other FBI officials make it clear that employer discretion is permissible.

So, as if financing, fairness, civil liberties and the baffling question of how best to protect children at school, home and anywhere in between weren’t enough to deal with, lawmakers now have conflicting FBI spokesmen on their hands. Three months of wrestling with this and it’s only gotten worse. Amazing.

Lawmakers now have several choices. They can, and probably should, scrap the entire law, admit that it was poorly considered, researched and presented, and start from scratch. They can, once they get definitive information from the FBI, proceed with the new hires compromise. They can, of course, do nothing, let the amendments and revisions die and allow this four-year-old piece of flawed legislation to take effect and to let a future legislature deal with the consequences. Which is how this Legislature got into this mess in the first place.