Delaware’s AFSCME 3911 got a dose of payback this week and apparently concluded the same tactics unions have used against their members for years can’t just be shrugged off when the roles are reversed.

As reported by Philadelphia’s Station 6 ABC News, a Delaware man is accused of stealing more $126,000 from his own union by forging signatures of members onto phony checks over the course of three years.

Wilmington resident Matthew Adams, a former employee and board member of AFSCME Local 3911, was arrested by U.S. marshals in the Virgin Islands and is currently awaiting extradition on charges of fraud and theft.

Really? You mean those things are crimes?

As you may remember, the Freedom Foundation has uncovered dozens of cases Oregon and California in which public employee unions including AFSCME and SEIU were caught red-handed forging their members’ signatures on dues-deduction forms in order to continue siphoning off a portion of their paycheck even after the worker had made it clear he or she wanted to exercise their Constitutional right to opt out.

This past June, in fact, Freedom Foundation attorneys appealed a forgery-related case from Washington to the U.S. Supreme Court

As is their practice, the justices declined to consider the case because it would have required them to reinforce their 2018 ruling in Janus v. AFSCME, which addressed just this sort of union criminality.

Instead, the court let stand a lower court ruling later affirmed by the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals holding that, because the state had delegated its payroll responsibilities to the union, it couldn’t be held responsible for deducting dues from a worker based on a bogus membership form. And because the union wasn’t a state actor — meaning it lacked the authority it had been permitted to exercise — it, too, was blameless.

It bears noting that in none of the cases litigated by the Freedom Foundation did law enforcement even treat the forgery as a crime. No serious criminal investigation was ever undertaken, nor were the perpetrators ever prosecuted.

Evidently the double standard extends from coast to coast and even beyond U.S. shores. It’s perfectly fine for unions to forge membership applications for workers who wouldn’t otherwise sign up so their wages can be stolen and funneled into the pockets of union leaders.

But when a union officer uses the same tactic on the union itself, suddenly fraud and theft become a federal case.