Northampton County Councilman Nick Sabatine says he may challenge State Senator Lisa Boscola in this year's general election. Boscola is the best-known member of the airport authority's board of governors, as is Jeff Skinner, a former chairman of the Lehigh County Commission and, more recently, a number-cruncher for confessed-felon Michael Solomon's wounded, $111-million, 30-year mega-bond.

A specter haunts the parapets of Northampton County Prison's cold stone walls. It is Michael Solomon's ghost whose plaintive shrieks, sharp as the ribbon-wire atop the prison's perimeter, slice the February night's pre-dawn cold. They cross Easton's Union Street, to the vacant field beyond, as rampant with weeds as the "shadow governments" that spring from Reibman's Medusa-like head. As Solomon's ghost recedes, it is replaced by the apparition of his $80-million prison. At the pace his state and federal investigations and sentencing proceeds, he could well wind up being the prison's first inmate.

Before building the prison, however, Sabatine and his council cohorts should remodel Reibman's various "shadow governments," beginning with Doughty (pronounced doubty), and his airport authority. Council could then proceed to the Lehigh Valley Economic Development Corporation (LVEDC), followed closely by radical surgery on the General Purpose Authority, or GPA.

These "shadow governments" all pervert Pennsylvania's constitution, so much so that Reibman himself promised to abolish them when in 1977 he first sought the county executive's seat. Here's proof of just how destructive to honest, open government these shadowy imitations have become: The lead editorial in yesterday's Express-Times deplores the rampant proliferation of these "shadow governments." The perplexed editorial asks... "LVEDC? EEDC (Easton Economic Development Corporation)?... DCED (Department of Community and Economic Development)?

"Is that Northampton or Lehigh County?" queries a befuddled E-T. The answer is both - Northampton and Lehigh counties both - in the chimera created by Reibman and pals that has now come to be known as the Lehigh Valley (when, geologically, the Lehigh Valley includes the New Jersey counties of Warren and Hunterdon, a fact not lost on former Governors Tom Ridge and Christie Whitman in their political conniving).

While at it, county council should redesign the government center, eliminating the hermetically sealed windows with ones that open, through which they can throw GPA Chairman Reibman and fellow members like Vince Dominach, who doubles as Reibman's director of the Northampton County DCED.

The DCED, readers should recall, is the department that metastasized from the original office of planning and development, staffed solely by Michael Solomon (Reibman, currently testifying before a grand jury in Harrisburg, stoutly denies any knowledge of Solomon's many other offices, notably those providing bogus insurance services).

Seriously, County Council must get out its broom and sweep the county clean of its "shadow governments." The grand jury investigating Reibman is also investigating the LVEDC, and its shadowy connections to Elmer Gates and Michael Solomon.