There are enough ways to gamble in North Dakota. We don't need another. Any continuation of the effort to introduce regulated poker-playing on the Internet should simply fold its hand.

The pot is supposed to be hundreds of millions of dollars for the state Treasury. There are some reasons this play amounts to a busted hand:

3 First and most importantly, online poker gambling is illegal in the United States, according to the Justice Department. There is no indication that will change.

3 The constitution of North Dakota would have to be amended by the voters to allow cyberspace gambling to be licensed in the state.

3 A bill to allow it was wisely defeated in the Legislature earlier this year. It should stay defeated. Lawmakers will have more pressing issues to consider during the next session than to give people one more way to gamble.

The online poker business got renewed attention when five North Dakota legislators took an unofficial trip to the Caribbean island nation of Antigua in October. Antigua is a haven for Internet gambling companies.

North Dakota taxpayers didn't pay for the trip.

The lawmakers said, on their return, when a report of the trip became widely known, that it was much more about possible trade relations than about online gambling.

We have the North Dakota Trade Office and the state Department of Agriculture that are doing very well in putting together trade relations with other countries. An ad hoc group of legislators isn't likely to improve much on the efforts of those entities.

Anyway, North Dakota may not want to have Antigua as a trading partner, since the country is under sanctions by both the United Kingdom and the United States for its lax handling of money laundering.

The trip has resulted in partisan potshots because the five who went to Antigua were Republicans. It shouldn't have mattered which party they belong to. But it isn't seemly that the by-invitation-only trip was arranged by one legislator who pushed previously, unsuccessfully, to get Internet poker into North Dakota and declares that he won't stop trying.

The Legislature needs to decide how to handle the manner in which its members take trips - or report trips - that are not paid for by the state.

The trip that five North Dakota legislators took to a Caribbean island is history. The furor can die down now.

Likewise, the notion of allowing foreign gambling companies to do business in North Dakota - and letting them use the Bank of North Dakota to do it - should die and pass into history.