The Hewlett-Packard organization has been dealing with a scandal involving its chairwoman, Patricia Dunn. There has been considerable turmoil about her efforts to discover if any of her fellow board members have been leaking company information to the media and it cost her job.

For somebody as smart and capable as Dunn is supposed to be, she displayed a ridiculous lack of judgment in this particular quest. Did she act out of emotion when common sense would have worked better?

Investigators she hired apparently revealed the informant by asking telephone companies for their personal calling records of board members and some reporters. Dunn denied knowledge of the practice, as it was conducted, yet has wound up looking foolish because of the incident.

Here is an accomplished woman who headed up one of the major companies in America. She used spy tactics to catch an errant leaker; she paid a heavy price. Along with being ousted, she lost a great deal of prestige and respect.

Much has been made, of course, about privacy and the right to it and tactics that spymasters are allowed to use in ferreting out information. It is one thing, however, for national security to be at stake and quite another when somebody has been passing data on a company to outsiders, like the media.

Dunn was supposed to be in charge. If she suspected leaks from official meetings, she could have called the board to order, informed the members of her suspicions and told them that they were all under suspicion and would be carefully scrutinized if the leaks persisted.

If that didn’t stop the data drainage, Dunn could have called another meeting and said she was going to take special steps, including phone-tapping, to get to the bottom of things. Everything would have been out in the open. Chances are those two actions would have put a stop to the flow of information.

But perhaps it was her Hewlett-Packard computerized mentality that led Dunn to take the “spies in the night” route.

Too bad for somebody that good to get that petty when there were other, more sensible, ways to solve the problem.