Virginia State Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli came to office with, among others, two goals ― killing Obamacare and discrediting a scientist who specialized in global warming.

Cuccinelli doesn't believe in either one. Minutes after President Barack Obama signed the Affordable Health Care Act last March, the Virginia AG filed a federal suit against it, declining to join a consortium of 26 other states' attorneys general who did likewise, in order to go it alone.

Last September, a federal court of appeals threw out his case and the U.S. Supreme Court declined to review the decision.

But Cuccinelli had also filed a state-court suit, and, with it, blanketed the University of Virginia with civil subpoenas seeking all of professor ― and prominent climate scientist ― Michael Mann's records, drafts, handwritten notes and emails, as well as "Mann's grant applications, and correspondence between Mann and research assistants, secretaries and 39 other scientists across the country," according to The Washington Post.

(This was in spite of the fact that Mann was now teaching at Penn State and, if he were conducting bogus research, it had become Pennsylvania's problem, not Cuccinelli's.)

Academics quickly and correctly saw this as an attempt to meddle politically in scientific research and intimidate researchers from reaching conclusions with which Cuccinelli, a global-warming skeptic and Tea Party-movement favorite, disagreed.

On Friday, the Virginia Supreme Court ruled that Cuccinelli lacked the authority to force the university to turn over the records, effectively ending a two-year investigation, but not before UVA had spent more than $570,000 in legal fees, all of it privately raised, and Cuccinelli had spent who knows how much on his fruitless quest to quash the global-warming research.

The Virginia state legislature should certainly ask how much this pointless exercise cost the state's taxpayers. The legislature should know from pointless since it recently ordered a costly, invasive and medically unnecessary vaginal procedure merely to intimidate women considering an abortion.

Meanwhile, isn't there something better the attorney general could do with his time and the state's money? Like maybe fight crime.

The article was published and distributed by Scripps Howard News Service (www.scrippsnews.com).