You know the line about how a grand jury would indict a ham sandwich? Well, feature the hoagie that’s been handed up in Houston, where a runaway grand jury has just indicted two anti-abortion activists for going undercover against Planned Parenthood.

Supposedly the prosecutor was going to be investigating Planned Parenthood, but the grand jury ended up indicting the investigators. Now two young idealists could land in the big house for 20 years.

This for the felony of “tampering with governmental records,” as the New York Times put it, “probably connected to their alleged use of fake driver’s licenses to get into a Planned Parenthood office.”

The indicted duo is David Daleiden and an associate, Sandra Merritt. Mr. Daleiden is the founder of the Center for Medical Progress, a not-for-profit that dubs itself “a group of citizen journalists” reporting on medical ethics.

Last year it published a series of ghastly videos, surreptitiously recorded, of Planned Parenthood executives discussing the sale of body parts harvested from abortions. The group’s journalists caught doctors blithely talking about harvesting intact trunks and brains.

The journalists posed as buyers for a fake company interested in buying body parts for research. Mr. Daleiden has since said his organization uses “the same undercover techniques that investigative journalists have used for decades.”

Such techniques are highly controversial. The reporter’s handbook of the New York Sun, which I edit, prohibits using “disguises, false poses, or dishonesty.” Other papers, including some leading institutions, occasionally permit undercover techniques.

So for a few moments after the indictments were handed up in Houston, I imagined the big liberal papers might swing in behind the Center for Medical Progress, at least on First Amendment principles.

In 2013, after all, the Huffington Post quoted star Times reporter James Risen lamenting what HuffPo’s headline called “the lost art of undercover reporting.” Mr. Risen recalled how the Chicago Sun-Times once opened a fake tavern to catch crooked city inspectors.

HuffPo’s reporter, Michael Calderone, quoted a spokesman for The New York Times suggesting that sometimes undercover work is allowed. A reporter would, as Mr. Calderone paraphrases him, “need to first discuss the possibility of doing undercover work in advance with a masthead-level editor.”

“Gentlemen’s Agreement,” one of the most famous Hollywood movies about undercover journalism, stars Gregory Peck as a magazine reporter. He poses as a Jew to expose the phenomenon of so-called polite anti-Semitism.

Even federal agents pose as people they’re not when pursuing a big case. The most famous is the Abscam investigation, in which FBI employees posed as rich Arabs trying to bribe members of Congress. (A United States Senator from New Jersey, Harrison Williams, did time in the scandal.)

Yet it’s hard to find any mainstream paper defending the Center for Medical Progress. “Poetic justice” is the phrase one Los Angeles Times columnist uses to describe the indictment of the citizen journalists.

How about “political justice”? The district attorney handling this ham sandwich ran for office as a “proud, pro-life Texan mother of two,” the AP reports, but “infuriated anti-abortion activists” when a grand jury “cleared a doctor accused of ending late-term pregnancies.”

“Vindication for Planned Parenthood” is how the New York Times describes the grand jury’s action against the journalists of the Center for Medical Progress. Not even 20 years would “undo the damage” that the videos have done to Planned Parenthood, opines the Times.

That’s the same newspaper that worked with Julian Assange and Wikileaks to air government secrets. It’s plumping for the feds to go easy on Edward Snowden. A year ago, the Guardian made Chelsea Manning, Wikileaks’ most famous source, a contributing opinion writer.

So to the citizen journalists of the Center for Medical Progress, I say, buck up. The grand jury is an early stop. The next word, if it gets that far, will come from a petit jury. Meantime, other jurisdictions are looking at Planned Parenthood.

America is coming up on 50 years after Roe v. Wade and the country is still torn in two over whether abortion is protected under the right to privacy. The era has begotten a market in body parts that has shocked a nation. Citizen journalists have risked jail for lesser stories.

This column first appeared in the New York Post.