“Under cover of darkness, the trucks rumble out from an industrial complex hidden in a wooded ravine,” the article begins.

Disobeying speeding laws, they hurtle through the darkness on Virginia roads, packed with cargo that amounts to 120,000 tons of solid waste in state landfills each year.

Is this more of those hated New York garbage trucks we’ve heard so much about that have been recklessly drowning us in their imported Yankee trash like Knicks pennants or paper cups from their Italian ices?

Nope, they’re delivery trucks for the Washington Post. So asserts “Menace In Virginia: The Papers,” a June 21 article by John Tierney in The New York Times. It’s a merciless rebuttal of the Post’s three-day front-page series last year on the dangers of out-of-state trash being imported into Virginia.

Despite alarmed politicians decrying in the Post that all of Virginia will become an open landfill any moment, Tierney points out that the new Virginia landfills together only make up three square miles out of the state’s 40,000 square miles.

Furthermore, Tierney says, twisting in the knife, Virginia taxpayers spend at least $5 million a year discarding old copies of the