We thank Maine Sen. Susan Collins for continuing her exhaustive hearings into the agency responsible for securing our homeland. Tuesday, we learned from her committee that the people running FEMA were not only incompetent but also selfish and corrupt.

Collins’ Homeland Security Committee on Tuesday revealed “egregious examples of wasteful and even fraudulent spending” in the Department of Homeland Security.

According to a committee report, employees of the agency, armed with credit cards, were looting the federal treasury even as looters, armed with rifles, were pillaging New Orleans.

The report found that everything from laptop computers to Apple iPods to global positioning devices worth hundreds of thousands of dollars may never have been delivered or were quickly stolen

Auditors from the Government Accountability Office found that 45 percent of purchases weren’t properly authorized, and they could find no evidence of goods or services having been received in 45 percent of cases.

There was another development Tuesday in the Katrina saga: Three women – a doctor and two nurses – were charged with second-degree murder, accused of killing four elderly patients with a mixture of sedatives and painkillers.

The three worked at at 317-bed hospital left cut off and without power for three days after the hurricane. During that time, they worked around the clock as temperatures within the building rose to more than 100 degrees and armed bands of thugs raided medical facilities for restricted drugs.

Perhaps these three women are guilty as charged. If they are, the federal and state officials who failed to plan for and respond to the crisis should be charged as accessories.

Collins’ Homeland Security Committee has been meeting for months trying to figure out the reasons behind the abysmal federal and state response to the hurricanes that hit the U.S. Gulf Coast late last summer.

Incompetent leadership of the Federal Emergency Management Agency left many of America’s poorest and most vulnerable sweltering and dying in horrific conditions.

After several congressional hearings, the political appointee who headed the agency, Michael Brown, resigned and was quickly reappointed as a consultant to the agency. Since then, he has moved on with the next chapter in his life: starting a consulting agency in Washington, no doubt in hopes of somehow continuing to milk his D.C. connections.

Since Hurricane Katrina, we have discovered that contractors provided substandard materials for the levees, and construction work was often slipshod. Meanwhile, state and federal officials failed to plan for a disaster that had been predicted in extensive detail for many years.

Then, as the disaster unfolded, the federal government was bilked out of millions of dollars by everyone from unscrupulous suppliers to government workers to “victims” who suffered no damages and lived hundreds of miles from the disaster zones.

We can only hope that we now know enough to make sure none of this ever happens again.