A week ago, the state Supreme Court took the rare step of ordering Dauphin County Judge Todd A. Hoover to examine whether grand jury secrecy rules were broken.

Hoover supervised the jury probe that led to charges accusing DeNaples of lying to get his state slots-casino license, as well as related perjury charges brought against a Scranton priest, the Rev. Joseph Sica, a DeNaples confidant.

Raising the ante even further, the court in an unsigned order directed Hoover to determine whether a special prosecutor should be named to plumb the alleged leaks.

Without question, courts and prosecutors have a right to review alleged leaks by grand jury participants, who are barred from discussing such proceedings. Prosecutors in this case, however, deny there were any leaks.

The mere fact there was media coverage of the DeNaples jury witnesses' coming and going doesn't indicate that any secrecy rules were violated. By law, those witnesses are free to speak about their appearance - which explains the media coverage of the jury's work.

What the court risks in a plumbers investigation is creating the impression that this is a witch hunt aimed at the media merely for doing their job.

It was at the urging of perjury defendants DeNaples and Sica that the Supreme Court acted on the leak probe. DeNaples contends, according spokesman Kevin Feeley, that news coverage of the grand jury was "outrageous and very harmful" to DeNaples.

How could news reports have affected the work of the grand jury? The panel members, after all, were privy to everything going on in the jury room. Any media disclosures wouldn't come as news to them.

The Supreme Court wisely rejected moves by DeNaples and Sica to have their perjury counts thrown out before they go to trial. Similarly, the high court earlier refused DeNaples' demand that the grand jury probe be halted.

As to the DeNaples claim that prosecutors have an agenda, the only known agenda is to find out whether DeNaples lied about mob ties. The leak probe is a sideshow to that search for the truth.