By Barb Shelly, Kansas City Star editorial page columnist

If the account given by Phill Kline's lawyer is correct, the problem with abortion records containing sensitive patient information originated with a court in Wichita.

Attorney Caleb Stegall says someone from Sedgwick County District Court erroneously mailed the documents to the Johnson County district attorney's office as Kline was finishing up his term there. Someone there mailed the package on to Kline at his new workplace in Virginia, Stegall said. But the package was wrongly addressed so it ended back in Johnson County.

Regardless of who is at fault, the judge in the case initiated by Kline should be very disturbed by the thought of patients' records zipping across the country and back.

Kline may be an unwitting bystander in this latest outrage, but a former aide testified that he kept patients' records in his apartment dining at one point while Kline was changing jobs. And the Kansas Supreme Court criticized Kline when he was district attorney for his handling of records from the Planned Parenthood Clinic in Johnson County

These instances validate the concerns of the operators of clinics in Johnson County and Wichita, who predicted that patients' privacy would be jeopardized. If investigations of this sort are begun in the future, judges have to come up with a more secure system.