News that the district attorney of Queens County is looking into the residency of Michael and Arliene Reich of the Democratic County Committee is a welcome development over the weekend. The Reichs, as our Benjamin Smith reported last week, turn out to be living in a mansion in Lawrence, in the County of Nassau, even though they’re serving on the Democratic Committee in Queens. State Law and county regulations say that to serve on a political party’s county committee, one has to be from the county one is serving.

Mr. Reich has refused to talk to our reporter about his residency (or anything else), twice slamming down the phone on the affable Mr. Smith. The gentleman who passes for a spokesman for the Long Island interests, William Murphy, who is staff writer of Newsday, has mocked our report of the matter. He writes that whatever our reading of 2. the law, things don’t work that way. He seems to be suggesting that because Mr. Reich holds an appointed position on the Democratic State committee he’s somehow exempt from the residency requirements that go with a seat on the Queens County committee.

Well, we come from what is sometimes called the “plain meaning” school of law. And the plain meaning of the law and of the county regulation is that if Mr. and Mrs. Reich want to serve on the Democratic County Committee in Queens, they’ve got to reside in Queens. Documents on file with the New York City Board of Elections show that on September 21, 2000, Mr. Reich swore an affidavit to which was attached a list of members of the Democratic County Committee. It included himself and his wife, as members from the 11th election district of the 24th assembly district, with an address at 57-11 223rd Street in the Queens neighborhood of Bayside.

As it happens, records are also on file with the City Register in Queens indicating that the Reichs sold the Bayside house two weeks before, on September 7. And as it also happens, there is a voter registration card on file in Lawrence, indicating that Mrs. Reich was a registered voter there as early as 1997. We offer these documents alongside herewith, though presumably the office of the Queens District Attorney, Richard Brown, will have no trouble locating its own copies.

Now, New Yorkers tend to live complicated lives and often for good reason, and we can imagine all sorts of innocent explanations for how Mr. Reich happened to swear out an affidavit to which was attached a list with his former address. But under the plain meaning test, the law is saying that the Reichs either have to move back to Queens or get off its Democratic County Committee.

This may not sound like the biggest deal in the world, but if we have learned anything about law enforcement in the past decade in the city, it is that paying attention to the little things matters. Enforcing the law against the squeegee man sends an important signal to those who are thinking about committing more serious infractions. The residency laws for party county committees, moreover, were written for a reason. The whole point of local government is that it is local. That is a point to enforce for those intent on building local government in New York that is also honest.