Stealing New Jersey's lunch money?

Chris Christie wants to improve public education by cracking down on New Jersey's supposedly fraud-filled school lunch programs.

A new "Education Funding Task Force" will, among other tasks, investigate whether masses of parents pretend to be poorer than they really are so their kids can help themselves to federally funded cafeteria offerings.

"How we spend education dollars in our schools is just as important as how we provide them," the governor said Monday. "Funding must follow the child more closely and get to the students who need it most. This Task Force will help to root out and eliminate well-documented fraud and abuse in the Free and Reduced Price School Lunch Program, which has led to the possible misdirection of tens of millions of dollars of education funding."

Joining Christie for the announcement was N.J. Sen. Michael Doherty, R-Hunterdon, who's been making lots of statewide hay about the purported kiddie food fraud explosion. Doherty entertains Tea Party audiences and readers of Conservative New Jersey, where he is something of a star, with claims that upwards of 160,000 students in the state are stealing our collective lunch money.

But a Politifact analysis casts doubt on that figure. Also to be taken with a grain of salt: Doherty's dramatic warning that the recent blatant case of lunch money abuse in Elizabeth is merely the tip of the Garden State iceberg.