EDITORIAL TELLTALE SEAL COUNTY SUPERVISORS CAN'T ESCAPE THE EMBLEM THEY DESPISE.

IT sounds like something out of Edgar Allan Poe.

Six months ago, three county supervisors - in cahoots with the lawyerly vigilantes at the American Civil Liberties Union - decided to rid Los Angeles County of its decades-old seal with its minuscule gold cross. The supervisors passed a resolution, and they allocated $700,000 to purge the offending bit of historic religiosity from public view.

But it hasn't worked.

Instead, the seal, which scarcely no one had seen, let alone noticed, is now everywhere. Defiant county employees have affixed the old seal to their new, religiously sanitized uniforms. Defiant supervisors continue to use the old seal in their offices. The ongoing controversy assures the seal a regular spot on the newspapers' front pages, and old decals are selling like hotcakes on eBay.

Not even in the room where the supes voted to ban the cross-laden seal have they been able to make it disappear. Even though county workers covered the old seal that hangs on the wall with a massive decal of its replacement, the cross continues to shine through, refusing to be erased.

A miracle, or just a fitting example of how the censorious supes can't get anything right? You decide, but there's a wonderful irony in the saga of the anti-religionists who tried desperately to make the cross disappear, only to make it grow larger than life.

Back when they began their crusade, they were trying to prevent controversy, just in case someone might someday stumble upon the tiny cross and take offense. Now they have created a massive controversy they can't escape.

On a more serious note, a new report finds that although hate crimes are in decline in the county, their incidence is rising among teenage girls. Even in the nation's safest cities in nearby Ventura County, real examples of intolerance are out there for anyone willing to take a look. In Simi Valley, four racist white teens have been arrested for attacking a black teenager, and in Thousand Oaks, vandals desecrated a menorah.

It seems that these are the sorts of offenses that real civil libertarians should be concerned about, not eradicating a tiny emblem that no one ever minded - and whose removal has insulted so many.