While I professionally monitor the energy scene around the nation, sometimes a story close to home crops up that is too hard to ignore.

HELP FOR AQUILA ADVANCES, says the headline atop the Local Section of today's Kansas City Star.

For those of you not following the saga, the star-crossed utility built a power plant in Cass County, Missouri, The company built a power plant in rural Missouri with state regulatory approvals - but not the local zoning OK.   The Missouri House is going to consider a legislative proposal that would give Aquila an escape hatch and allow it to avoid dismantling the $140 million plant under a court order.

Aquila has been a utility house or horrors - or comedy of errors - for the past few years. Miscues have included disaster upon disaster, compounded by senior executives handing each other large bonuses. The rise and fall of Rick Green, the company chairman, is truly a tragedy. For a period, he smartly transformed the company, taking it from a suburban outpost not to far from where the madcap Kansas City Royals "play" baseball all the way to Australia and the shadow of Westminster Abbey in London.

Then, the utility got into trading excesses along with Enron, and it all imploded. Aquila is about to be dismembered and acquired by others, like Great Plains Energy.

How a utility manages to build a power plant without securing all the necessary agreements is beyond me. Call it a morality play on the need to make sure all "I"s are dotted before pursuing grand ambitions. If you cannot screw in a light bulb without the house crashing down around you, Aquila teaches us, you quickly become a silly joke.