After the game-fixing scandal involving former NBA referee Tim Donaghy, Major League Baseball is right to ask discomfiting questions about its umpires -- including whether they gamble, live beyond their means, smoke pot or belong to organizations like the KKK. This isn't character assassination, and it's not screaming "fire!" in the absence of smoke. It's common sense taken to its obvious end.

Umpires are in positions of authority, with the capability of single-handedly affecting the lives of countless people, both in terms of gambling (winning or losing money) and general happiness, i.e., purposely blowing a call that goes against your team. Their objectivity cannot be questionable. While no one doubts that arbiters are occasionally influenced by grudges, personal dislikes and grammar-school pettiness, fans cannot be questioning (even to themselves) whether an umpire has been bought off or otherwise compromised.

Fearful of their own Donaghy-like development, MLB has reportedly released the hounds, sending investigators to question the neighbors, friends, acquaintances, mistresses and cabana boys of its umpires.

"The questions that we found out are being asked are about beating wives, marijuana use and extravagant parties," World Umpires Association president John Hirschbeck said to the Associated Press in a telephone interview Wednesday. "And then finally with this whole thing about the Ku Klux Klan.

"You get someone from security, shows his credentials and starts asking these kind of questions, and right away what's the neighbor going to think other than the umpire is in trouble, he's done something wrong and he's going to lose his job."

If I were an umpire and people were investigating my background, I'd probably shit twice and die. But that's why I'm not an umpire (or even currently employed). If umpires don't want investigators asking uncomfortable questions about their finances, friendships, families and pot-smoking habits, they should find another line of work, because the public needs to know that umpires have not been unduly influenced.

Can these investigations go too far? Can they be abused? Of course. But that's the risk we take with investing power in the hands of investigators -- and it's the same kind of power we invest in umpires. Hey, no one likes Internal Affairs, but they're a necessary evil, because they combat the threat of a greater evil: the undermining of the entire system.

Investigating umpires is not un-American. It's not a witch-hunt, it's not torture, and it doesn't run counter to the dictates of the Geneva Convention. It's common sense taken to a certain end: acknowledging the fallibility of human beings and trying to keep the most fallible -- the umpires who've been compromised by failures in judgment, ethics or associations -- as far away from the diamond as possible.

Who, other than the umpires themselves (and perhaps the ACLU) has a problem with this? If umps don't like it, well, we can always get Enrico Palazzo.