Truck driver Vaughn Hardesty Jr. slipped through the “cracks.”

Must have been the same “cracks” that allowed trucker Scott Hewitt to drive an 18-wheeler despite a long rap sheet of traffic violations and a prior fatal accident.

Hewitt, you will remember, ultimately drove his truck into a line of cars stopped for construction on the Maine Turnpike, killing a young woman.

Fortunately, Hardesty was stopped before he could kill anyone Monday in Norway. He was arrested behind the wheel of a fully loaded logging truck after it was spotted weaving through town. Police found two bottles of vodka in the cab. One was empty, the other half full.

Wednesday, Hardesty’s employer, Wm. A. Day & Sons of Porter, said Hardesty produced a valid license when he applied for a job with the firm. Hardesty’s information was passed to the firm’s insurance company which, it is believed, checked Hardesty’s driving record.

Logically, a trucking firm and its insurance company have a big financial stake in keeping people like Hardesty out of the cab of a truck. Had Hardesty rolled his truck into a group of children waiting for a school bus, the multi-million-dollar lawsuits would have dragged on for years.

That’s why we’re guessing Hardesty’s record was checked by the insurance company and came back clean.

We’re also guessing that because it’s exactly what New York State Police reported having happened when they stopped Hewitt last year for a violation the day before his crash on the Maine Turnpike.

Police there reported stopping Hewitt, running a computer background check of Maine records, which came back clean – no violations.

Of course, as we later learned, that was far from the truth.

We have two questions:

First, how did Vaughn Hardesty hold a valid Maine commercial driver’s license when his record shows an OUI conviction and a raft of speeding violations in the past seven years?

Second, if a driving record was produced for the trucking company’s insurance firm by the state of Maine did it fully show Vaughn Hardesty’s incredibly bad record of accidents, speeding violations, drunken driving and general habit of thumbing his nose at the law?

The public deserves to know the answers.

If another trucker kills or injures somebody in Maine, we don’t want to hear that his driving record fell through some computer “crack.”