There’s something in the water.

No, not swine flu, although this contaminant has been known to make people feverish. But it doesn’t cause them to take to their sickbeds. Instead, the disease attacks their brains, resulting in irrational actions. The afflicted rush into the streets, babbling allegations about imaginary threats posed by inhuman entities.

It’s not easy to detect the poison that produces this reaction, but if you hold a glass of water up to the light, you can sometimes see a faint greenish tinge in the liquid. It’s not algae or snail snot. That slight coloration is a sure sign the aquifer has been infected with the pandemic called Eco-Whacko Syndrome.

Here’s how the illness manifests itself. Seemingly normal people suddenly come to believe that Maine is being drained of its precious bodily fluids.

By which they mean its groundwater.

They panic, convinced the state will soon be reduced to a barren wasteland like Saudi Arabia, where most people are parched, not only for water but also for constitutional rights. So naturally, they decide that the only way to save Maine’s essential liquids is to take away some of our constitutional rights.

That doesn’t make a lick of sense, but there’s no vaccine to restore sense to those suffering from the syndrome.

Ironically, the Eco-Whackos are partly correct. Every day, millions of gallons of our water are being lost, at least temporarily. Because nobody has any use for most of the state’s groundwater, it runs off into rivers and streams, ending up in the ocean, where it eventually evaporates, becomes rain and falls again upon the land. This process has been going on for a few billion years without any help from misguided activists.

Nevertheless, the EWs have decided it isn’t too late to fix any little flaws in nature’s system. Fortunately, nature is pretty durable and will likely outlast the illness-derived and ill-advised efforts to improve it. Unfortunately, a lot of people who live here may not be as adaptable.

The EWs are convinced Maine is committing environmental suicide by allowing companies such as Poland Spring to bottle and sell a tiny portion of the water that would otherwise flow off in the general direction of Europe. The reason they don’t like Poland Spring, which creates about 800 jobs in the state, is because it’s a corporation. And everyone knows corporations are bad.

Well, not quite everyone. Numerous state and federal court cases have established that corporations, being primarily composed of human beings, enjoy many of the same constitutional protections as people. But the EWs don’t accept that legal precedent. They believe these businesses should have no fundamental rights at all.

Oddly, these far-left fruitcakes’ penchant for depriving others of their liberty elicits comparisons to their counterparts on the opposite end of the political spectrum. Their anti-corporate philosophy bears a close resemblance to right-wing extremists’ attitudes toward homosexuals, not to mention that pre-World War II unpleasantness with the Jews.

In February, the EWs convinced the town of Shapleigh to approve an ordinance that said it could ignore the U.S. and Maine constitutions when dealing with corporations. This legally suspect maneuver was part of an effort to prevent Poland Spring from testing the local aquifers to see if some of the excess could be bottled.

If this outbreak of Eco-Whackoism had been quarantined in Shapleigh, the disease might have died out. But the germs spread to Newfield, and positive tests are showing up in places as widely scattered as Wells, Hancock and Lamoine. Now, there’s a bill in the Legislature that would allow any municipality to ignore the Constitution in deciding how to deal with an application from a water-bottling company – or any other corporation conducting any other type of business.

You don’t need a law degree to figure that if this measure passes, it’s going to have a difficult time surviving a legal challenge. And you don’t need a medical-school degree to diagnose EW. All you need to do is read this comment Rick Burns, a former legislator and author of the anti-corporate measure, gave to the Portland Press Herald.

“This is a bill that welcomes any business that wants to come into any municipality in the state of Maine,” Burns said. “It lays out the groundwork that the first order of business is respect for the community you come into.”

You could understand why a corporation that heard that twisted take on the bill’s intent might decide it would be healthier to set up shop elsewhere.

Like Saudi Arabia.

If seemingly healthy people can be convinced by political sickos to deny constitutional rights to water bottlers, how long will it be before these extremists go after other targets, such as loggers, resort developers, franchise-business owners and farmers (only the non-organic ones, of course)?

If Germany in the 1930s was any indication, not long.

If you think I’m all wet, e-mail me at aldiamon@herniahill.net.