On Tuesday, the Maine Turnpike Authority filed a civil action against its former executive director, Paul Violette. Good.

The MTA is seeking the return of nearly $500,000 that it believes Violette took and used for personal expenses, including $143,000 in “abusive” credit charges on MTA-issued cards for personal and family spending, $25,000 for personal travel charged to MTA accounts, and another $160,000 worth of gift certificates paid for by the MTA and redeemed by Violette for his own use.

It’s a fraud case, pure and simple, and the MTA means to get the money back.

Every motorist who ever dropped a quarter in a toll basket along the turnpike appreciates the zeal with which the MTA is acting to reclaim the missing funds.

Violette’s spending habits before 2003 are not part of the MTA lawsuit because they were not investigated as part of the Office of Program Evaluation and Government Accountability audit, but it’s hard to believe that Violette’s spending habits suddenly sprung forth a mere eight years ago, and it may never be possible to put a dollar figure on the real damage. He headed the agency for 23 years, so the recent financial scrutiny covers only a third of his tenure.

And, while Violette has been publicly accused of wrongdoing and may very well face criminal action, we’re left to wonder what responsibility the MTA board has in this debacle.

We’re not talking about a board with static membership. We’re talking about two decades of various directors rubber-stamping Violette’s expense reports and explanations without question, while turning to turnpike users for more money in tolls and public bonds.

The few short months that former state Sen. Peter Mills has served as the interim MTA executive director have been an astonishingly refreshing change of accountability.

Even more refreshing, and more accountable, might be a wholesale change of the MTA slate of directors, the only real way to completely remove the taint of Violette’s reign of spending.

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How hot is it?

In Indiana, it’s hot enough to bake chocolate chip cookies on the dashboard of a car.

It took three hours and two minutes to bake eight cookies, but the staff at the Tribune in South Bend conducting the car-oven experiment declared the cookies not only edible but quite delicious.

It was that hot.

It’s also hot enough to kill people, pets and plants.

In the Kansas City metropolitan area, the heat is believed to have killed 13 people this summer. And emergency officials there are bracing for more deaths as the current heat wave marches toward the East Coast.

According to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, heat kills more Americans each year than any natural disaster, including tornadoes, floods, blizzards, earthquakes, lightning and hurricanes.

Heat is stealthy, and kills by overburdening our natural ability to cool our bodies. When we overheat, we die. It’s that simple.

While heat exhaustion is not easy for some particularly susceptible people to avoid, it is easy for most of us to avoid by limiting activity, staying hydrated and avoiding the sun.

This weekend, as the heat wave is expected to linger throughout the region, we urge a liberal dose of Maine-style common sense all around. Because, this weekend, when it’s 93 degrees, the heat index may really be 101 degrees, like it was in Lewiston on Thursday afternoon.

And, that can be a killer.

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