As if a political wormhole has opened up between Raleigh and Jefferson City, Missouri Gov. Matt Blunt has been sued over his administration's alleged deletion of e-mail backup tapes to avoid releasing messages concerning the wholesale destruction of public records and the firing of a whistle-blowing state employee.

The story should sound vaguely familiar to North Carolinians who have seen a flap over e-mail destruction arise in the wake of the firing of a state employee, Michael Biesecker reports. Here, it was a group of newspapers that sued the Gov. Mike Easley, and not a special investigative team that sued Missouri's governor, according to a story in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch.

The suit was filed in Cole County Circuit Court by the special investigation team set up by Attorney General Jay Nixon last November to probe allegations that Blunt's staff were destroying office e-mails in violating of state laws governing open-records requests and preservation of public documents.

The suit is filed against Blunt and Dan Ross, the state's custodian of records who works in the Office of Administration and oversees the computer system that handles and preserves e-mails for most of state government.

The suit says the order to delete was made on Oct. 31, less than a week after news broke about the firing a month earlier of Blunt's former deputy counsel, Scott Eckersley. The lawyer maintained that he was fired after raising concerns that the governor's staff was intentionally destroying e-mails that should be preserved as public records.

Blunt has maintained that Eckersley was fired for unrelated reasons.