Good thing we checked. When Governor Paul LePage was spouting his various opinions about open government (including that there should be limits to the most transparent administration in Augusta's history), he hadn't taken the legally required training about the state's open-government law. And he didn't take it before heading off on vacation, either.

Today, the Maine Supreme Court handed down a split decision in a case I've written about before (see "Government Secrecy is Fine with Maine's Attorney General," October 10, 2007), handing a victory to Maine Attorney General Steven Rowe - who kept himself conspicuously absent from the case.

Apparently, according to the three justices who voted in the majority in the 3-2 decision (not sure where the other two justices were), when Rowe wrote a formal letter on state letterhead asking three prominent Maine legal scholars to review the conduct of his office's investigation into a crime and report back to him, "in order to ensure continued public confidence" in his office, he created a review body outside the law that is not subject to the state's Freedom of Access Act.

UPDATED 3:10 pm May 15: The governor, through his spokesman, David Farmer, has said he supports the decision of the Corrections Department and the Attorney General's Office to depart from previous executive-branch practices and charge the news media to fulfill a public-records request.