It’s funny how protecting New York’s children has coincided so perfectly with filling the state’s tax coffers in the case of the online cigarette sales ban. Yesterday, a ban went into effect on selling cigarettes over the Internet to residents of New York State. The legislation was enacted in 2000, but the ban had been staved off by a court challenge. With a federal appeals court having taken the state’s side in February, state tax officials are getting ready to start fining people who sell smokes on the Web.

A Democratic Bronx assemblyman, Jeffrey Klein, wrote the legislation. He has cited both the concern of children buying cigarettes online and the state losing tax revenue as justifications for the ban. The concern about children, however, is chimerical: Both the district and circuit courts who heard the case challenging the ban accepted a study submitted by those challenging the law that showed that only 1.9% of children who have bought cigarettes illegally had used the Internet to do so.

It’s no wonder so few minors seem to use the Internet; there could hardly be a more difficult way to go about things. Most online cigarette retailers, at least the ones belonging to the Online Tobacco Retailers Association, are self-regulated. They require a credit card, photo identification, and a mailing address that can accept face-to-face deliveries from carriers such as UPS. How much harder is that for children than simply getting someone older to buy them at the nearest convenience store?

The person buying the cigarettes at a convenience store, though, would be paying some high taxes in New York State, especially in the city — and there we get to the bottom of the ban. The real problem the state has with online transactions with such places as Kentucky, North Carolina, or the Native American Seneca nation upstate is that they deny the state the share of cigarette revenues it has muscled in on. Governor Pataki and the state of New York and Mayor Bloomberg and the city, after all, have made, through the equity of excise, an enormous investment in the tobacco industry. They want the money.

It has come at a great cost, not only to the taxpayers but to the commerce clause of the Constitution, which the online ban, in our view, violates on its face. We’d like to think that eventually this issue will work its way through our system of constitutional review. Regulating interstate commerce is, after all, Congress’ job, and there are plenty of grounds for the Supreme Court yet to revisit the states’ power under the commerce clause. It may come in this case or in a similar case where New York has been seeking to ban consumers from buying out-of-state wine online. Ostensibly, that one, too, was for the children.