By Barb Shelly, Kansas City Star editorial page columnist

As the former Kansas attorney general and, more recently, as Johnson County district attorney, Phill Kline has justified his aggressive prosecutions of abortion providers by noting that judges have found probable cause to proceed with the cases.

If judges look at the evidence and decide there is reason to believe a crime has been commited, the case must be good, right?

Only if the prosecutor presents the evidence in an objective and truthful manner. Testimony in a hearing in Wichita this week raises serious questions about whether Kline did so.

From a report in today's Wichita Eagle:

The case of the 10-year-old girl who received a late-term abortion has become the center of Tiller's defense team's argument.

Documents produced by lawyer Dan Monnat showed:

The girl came with her mother from another state, carrying a letter from their local prosecutor's office. The letter said the girl needed "an immediate medical procedure that (could) only be done" at Tiller's Women's Health Care Services clinic.

The relative who raped her had already been charged.

Prosecutor Steve Maxwell and investigator Tom Williams would repeat the story of the girl's abortion, and Tiller's supposed failure to report it, to Shawnee County Judge Richard Anderson, court transcripts showed. But that was more than a year after they learned of the prosecution in the girl's home state.

Another document indicated Tiller had reported the girl's abortion to Kansas Child Protective Services. But Williams said that wasn't clear to him at the time.

Anderson, the judge, made his probable cause ruling based on information Kline's office presented. His information, in the case of the 10-year-old girl, was that Tiller had allowed a child rape to go unreported -- a violation of Kansas law. But that information was erroneous.

A revelation like this casts doubt on the entirety of Kline's claims. Unreported child rape was the rationale he used to get ahold of records of patients at two Kansas abortion clinics.