Last week’s issue of New York magazine had an interesting piece which charted the gestation of several big news stories from recent weeks. Among the stories tracked by the magazine was one which speculated whether John Edwards would acknowledge paternity of Rielle Hunter’s baby.

The point of the article was to show how the information in big news stories comes from many disparate sources these days. As it did for each of the seven news articles it featured, the magazine started with a specific news report — in Edwards’ case, a Sept. 20 story about the baby-daddy drama on the front page of The New York Times —and then showed how various news organizations had contributed little pieces of the unfolding story over the past couple of years. The National Enquirer gets much credit for exposing Edwards, of course, but others reported key bits. WRAL-TV in Raleigh is mentioned three times, and the Charlotte Observer gets credit for two significant updates.

The News & Observer, Edwards’ hometown paper, isn’t mentioned once. Of the two dozen times when the Edwards story was pushed further along by reporting, the magazine credits the N&O for none of them.

This isn’t meant to be red meat for the Glenn Beck crowd. My gut tells me the explanation for the N&O’s invisibility on the Edwards story is rooted more in circumstance than conspiracy. It was a tabloid rumor at first, and the N&O was reluctant to dive into the muck for the story. But when Edwards’ affair couldn’t be kept out of respectable newspapers any longer, the N&O had neither the manpower nor financial resources to catch up to the story, much less get ahead of the national reporting pack.

Still, it has to be humiliating for a proud paper to see the history of the Edwards saga set out in the pages of New York magazine — and not get so much as a faint mention for a story the N&O should have owned.

My son and I went to the North Carolina State Fair yesterday, no thanks to the city of Raleigh’s bus system — which trumpeted its service to the fairgrounds, but overlooked one key aspect: having a bus actually appear at the stop where we waited. And waited. And waited.

After nearly 45 minutes, we got in the car and drove to the fair. So much for our effort to be green citizens.

God knows we tried. We were each willing to pay the $4 roundtrip charge for a ride to the fairgrounds, about three miles away. (My fuel cost, after we gave up and drove ourselves, was probably less than a buck.) And we were willing to invest some extra time in the trip, as part of our stab at green living. But at a certain point, the algebra of environmental commitment does a 180-degree turn. When do you decide not to spend $8 to get to the fair when a buck’s worth of gas will do the trick; and not invest at least an hour of waiting and riding time when you can get their on your own within 15 minutes (as we eventually did)?

Answer: When the freakin’ bus doesn’t show up.

I don’t know Johnny Gaskins, the Raleigh criminal defense lawyer who faces as much as 35 years in prison for violating a federal law governing the way people handle their cash bank deposits. I’ve never met him, and my only tenuous connection to him is that a good friend of mine lives in Gaskins’ neighborhood.

All this is by way of saying I don’t have a dog in this fight. But reading this article in Sunday’s News & Observer about Gaskins sent a chill up my spine. The pertinent facts gleaned from the article are these:

(1) Gaskins specialized in defending murderers, lowlifes, drug dealers, etc. Naturally, that client roster didn’t endear him to cops and prosecutors.

(2) Many clients paid Gaskins in cash, and he let the cash pile up in a safe at his home.

(3) He declared the cash as income and paid taxes on it, as he was supposed to do.

(4) Gaskins had trust issues. When he finally decided to park his fat wad of cash in the bank, he divided it into relatively small amounts for deposit lest a criminally inclined teller figure out he was sitting on a hoard. (Yeah, that doesn’t make sense, but being irrational isn’t a crime — except, apparently, in federal court.)

(5) Under federal law, banks are required to report cash deposits of more than $10,000, in an effort to combat money laundering. As the N&O noted, “Purposely structuring cash deposits to cause a bank to evade reporting requirements is against the law.”

The article doesn’t indicate that Gaskins had a more nefarious intent, and that prosecutors nabbed him on a banking technicality only because that was the best case they could make (like putting Al Capone in prison for income tax evasion). This was the whole of their case: Gaskins earned his money legally, paid taxes on it, didn’t seek to launder it but was a little nutty about the way he handled it. Therefore he should go to prison.

I keep asking myself why a prosecutor would focus so relentlessly on the letter of the law and ignore its spirit. I keep coming back to (1) above. That’s what makes the chill run up my spine.