Some in law enforcement, including the FBI, failed tragically to prevent a killer from slaughtering 17 people at a Florida high school. But another agency, the Drug Enforcement Administration, may have failed to prevent far more deaths.

DEA officials were on the hot slast weekday during a congressional hearing. Several lawmakers asked why the agency failed to stop some drug distributors from shipping millions of opioid pain pills to small towns in West Virginia.

During a period of just a few years, tens of millions of pain pills were shipped into the state. One town of fewer than 3,000 people had millions of pills shipped into it.

One might expect members of Congress from West Virginia to be upset about the DEA’s failure, and they have been. Every one of the state’s U.S. representatives and senators has raised the Capitol roof over the situation.

But it was so egregious that during the hearing Tuesday, lawmakers from other states focused their anger on what was done to our state. “We spend billions of dollars, countless hours by law enforcement, trying to stop illegal drugs from coming into this country — and here we are sending millions of doses of opioids to tiny towns in West Virginia, all of this supposedly legally,” said an angry Rep. Diana DeGette, D-Colo.

“This has to stop. This has to stop now,” she added.

Robert Patterson, the DEA’s acting administrator, had excuses. “Where we have fallen short in the past is by not proactively leveraging the data that is available to us” on pain pill shipments, he said.

He added that a “manual process” using “paper and tape” took too long to count and track the shipments.

So the federal government doesn’t have any computers?

Give us a break. Why not tell the truth, for a change?

Had DEA officials considered the task a priority, it could have been accomplished more expeditiously.

Will anyone at the agency be punished for the lapse? Don’t make us laugh.

Members of Congress have a package of bills intended to address the opioid abuse crisis. Why should they expect new statutes will do any more good than existing ones that have not been enforced?