A year ago, North Carolina regulators issued a “do not drink” order for local water near coal “ash dump” sites run by the state’s power giant Duke Energy. Residents were warned not to drink or cook with the water because officials said testing showed “contamination of heavy toxic metals,” the culprit for that being coal ash, and the culprit for that being . . . coal, the natural substance most despised and battled by the Obama Administration and liberal legislators and regulators from coast to coast.

But last week, Tar Heel state bureaucrats lifted their order, telling bejeepers-scared residents they found the same (toxic?!) levels of chemicals in drinking water found nowhere near those ash dump sites. Reports the Charlotte Observer, the “state health agency said the change was driven in part because similar levels of vanadium and hexavalent chromium occur in public water supplies, including Charlotte’s, at levels considered safe. Recent tests have also found the elements in groundwater far from ash ponds.”

But let’s not let that get in the way of regulating, eh?

So North Carolina residents with perfectly safe potable water have been unduly frightened (good luck undoing that), Duke Energy has been smeared, and, for a year anyway, the truth was ignored, and all of that in the name of the Left’s anti-coal agenda. Collateral damage, true, but all in all, mission accomplished. On to the next contrived situation in the War Against Coal.