It’s hard to see a Texas lawsuit over the selection of a site for a new national bio-defense laboratory as anything but a case of sour grapes.

Manhattan, Kan., was selected in December as the site for the new National Bio- and Agro-Defense Facility, and Texas officials, who claim their San Antonio site was next in line for the lab, aren’t happy. So, on Thursday they filed a lawsuit in federal court claiming that Kansas gained an unfair advantage through its political connections and because of rule changes late in the selection process.

The remedy they seek is simple. The lawsuit asked the court to declare the selection of the Kansas site “illegal and therefore null and of no legal force and effect and direct the DHS to name the Texas Research Park as the site for the NBAF.”

This is typical Texas bravado. They aren’t asking the courts to order a new selection process; they just want the court to cancel the process and its result and make Texas the winner. Game over.

The lawsuit calls the selection of the Kansas site “arbitrary and capricious in that it resulted from improper and unfair political influence.” Kansas used “unfair political influence”? A former Texas governor named Bush was in the White House when this decision was made. How do you get more federal influence than that?

Their evidence of “irregularities” in the process seems to be that a Homeland Security official had a prior relationship with proponents of the Kansas site and that the frequency of tornadoes in Kansas would make building NBAF in Manhattan “grossly irresponsible, the equivalent of playing Russian roulette with Mother Nature,” said John Kerr, chairman of the Texas Biological and Agro-Defense Consortium.

Building their case on the possibility of severe weather may be a measure of their desperation. (Kansans will groan at the fact that the lawsuit even stooped to citing “The Wizard of Oz as evidence of the well-known tornado threat in Kansas.)

Severe weather can strike in any state. So can terrorists specifically targeting a bio-defense lab. The experts designing and building the lab have no doubt taken these risks into consideration. Maybe Kansas officials should argue that locating NBAF in San Antonio would increase the risk of a terrorist attack across the Mexico border just 150 miles to the west.

Texas officials also are complaining about a Homeland Security request in March 2008 for additional incentive offers. Other states were able to meet the end-of-the-month deadline for those offers — Kansas offered an additional $105 million — but Texas was able to offer only the promise to try to get $56 million approved when its Legislature reconvened in January.

There is no evidence that Kansas officials did anything unethical or against the rules. They just pursued the NBAF opportunity aggressively and won. That apparently is hard for Texas to swallow.

The Texas lawsuit also seeks an injunction that would block any progress on the NBAF project in Manhattan. It’s unfortunate that a questionable lawsuit may delay construction of a laboratory that will play a key role in protecting the nation and its food supply. Hopefully, the court will quickly dispatch this matter and let the project move forward.