Anybody with a newspaper subscription, television, Internet access or friends or relatives in Monmouth knows why former teacher Christopher Dumaine lost his certification. His high-profile extracurriculars with an underage student have earned him dismissal, jail, and 10 years on the state’s sex offender registry.

And cost him his certificate, yanked by the Maine Department of Education on Nov. 20. Except under an archaic, outmoded, unneeded, unexplainable, unbelievable 1913 statute, if anybody wanted to ask the state why Dumaine lost his certification, the state couldn’t legally say.

Even if it were another school system, in another state. Though Dumaine’s past, in this age of Google, will trail him forever, other teachers revoked for lower-profile – but nonetheless important – reasons can skedaddle Maine to teach elsewhere, their transgressions undiscovered and unreported.

No other state grants this protection to its teachers, for fears of unwittingly placing somebody like Dumaine back into a classroom. This is why the law should change.

Gov. John Baldacci, after The Associated Press revealed Maine’s peculiar statute in a recent investigation, has vowed to do so. The Legislature should make it a lesson in expediency.

After all, wayward students are vulnerable to their “permanent record” coming back to haunt them.

It’s only fitting their teachers should be, as well.