McHenry County making the front page of the Chicago Sun-Times twice in one week.

That’s probably a record since the tragic school bus-Metra train collision in Fox River Grove in the mid-1990’s.

First we are treated to the Thursday revelation of Congressman Joe Walsh’s child support problems.

And, today, we learn that McCullom Lake has the worst Com Ed electric service on storm days in the entire Chicago Metropolitan area.

I’ve extracted the data from the almost full-page chart. It shows “the total number of each town’s outage minutes divided by the population.”

Reporters Art Golab and Kim Janssen say this is “the first to compare towns of different sizes on a per-person basis.”

This, I would note as a former state legislator is the kind of information that the Illinois Commerce Commission should regularly report so members of the General Assembly can hold the regulators’ feet to the fire when such variation exists concerning the reliability of service.

Here are the numbers in McHenry County, from worst to best:

Com Ed employee fixes a line.

• McCullom Lake – 263.0
• Barrington Hills – 64.1
• Union – 57.2
• Port Barrington – 37.0
• Trout Valley – 33.1
• Lakemoor – 26.7
• Fox Lake 24.7
• Algonquin 24.3
• Lakewood – 23.5
• Oakwood Hills – 22.3
• Woodstock – 20.0
• Bull Valley – 17.4
• Crystal Lake – 16.6
• Johnsburg – 16.1
• Fox River Grove – 15.4
• Harvard – 14-8
• Chemung – 14.0
• Spring Grove – 12.7
• Prairie Grove – 10.5
• Cary – 9.3
• Hebron – 7.2
• Huntley – 7.1
• Lake in the Hills – 5.9
• Richmond – 5.7
• Marengo – 5.6
• Wonder Lake – 5.5
• Island Lake – 2.6

You can find all the numbers here.

The article will undoubted be used by opponents to electric supplers Com Ed and Ameren, who are seeking rate hikes to finance something they call a “smart gird.”

Illinois Attorney General Lisa Madigan’s Office claims that the legislation “will guarantee it huge profits while weakening reliability standards for years to come,” the article says.

The following seems to summarize the dispute:

“Under the current legislation, ComEd is required to prove its reliability performance to regulators before winning rate hikes, whereas under the bill the balance of power would shift so that regulators seeking to prevent a price hike would have to show that ComEd has failed to meet reliability standards, according to Illinois Commerce Commission executive director Tim Anderson.

“Crucially, ComEd would not be judged on its performance on the worst nine storm days each year.

“ComEd says that’s necessary to allow a fair year-to-year analysis that excludes extreme weather events beyond its control, but critics say it will allow ComEd to dodge improvements to its storm preparedness and response.

“The utility said the new performance standard ‘is designed to accurately measure ComEd’s day-to-day reliability performance; it is not designed to measure how lucky we are in avoiding severe weather.’”