Step right up, Eric Schmitt's latest legal clown show is underway. The Missouri attorney general and U.S. Senate candidate this week made a three-ring spectacle out of demanding information about how St. Louis city and county leaders reached their decisions to impose indoor mask mandates. What's next? Does Schmitt plan to demand that the city's firefighters explain why they use water in their firehoses?

Schmitt is suing the city and county over their mask mandates, part of a string of lawsuits he's filed against cities, schools, the Biden administration, even the People's Republic of China — all aimed at positioning himself as a more-extremist-than-thou champion of pandemic irresponsibility. In the upside-down universe of Republican politics today, that's what Schmitt thinks he must do to secure the Republican Senate nomination.

His school litigation promotes the out-and-out falsehood that "the science shows that public mask use has little effect on community spread." The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the World Health Organization and common sense say otherwise.

It's not that complicated: The virus is spread in respiratory droplets that are expelled when people talk and breathe and sneeze; masks catch the droplets. The Journal of the American Medical Association noted in February that the pandemic had by then provided a year's worth of "compelling data" showing "that community mask wearing is an effective nonpharmacologic intervention to reduce the spread of this infection."

Schmitt's anti-science rejection of that expertise appears to also be behind the announcement by his office that he has filed Sunshine requests with the city and county demanding emails and other records related to masks. As a Schmitt spokesman put it, the idea is "to uncover the truth about what science and decision-making processes that the city of St. Louis and other local governments relied upon."

Schmitt, like any other citizen, has the right to view those public records. But making a show out of demanding them, as if they're some kind of smoking gun that he's gallantly exposing, is almost as silly as his China lawsuit. A spokesman for County Executive Sam Page called Schmitt's announcement "a political stunt," which strikes us as too restrained a description. Mayor Tishaura Jones was appropriately dismissive in a tweet, telling Schmitt that the city's policy was guided by advice from health experts including the CDC — and asking facetiously if Schmitt perhaps now plans on suing that federal agency.

She shouldn't give him any ideas.

In trying to sue his way to a Senate seat, Schmitt is undermining local health decisions and endangering Missourians — and he's doing it as infection rates are rising in the St. Louis area and around the state. His lawsuits are so irrational and his motives so transparent that it does indeed qualify as a clown show. But there's nothing funny about it.

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