It’s no small feat for a state agency to be so relentlessly good at unleashing devilment when it’s supposed to be corking it up.

Here’s a toast then to the Oregon Liquor Control Commission.

Brewers of homemade beer and wine got the most recent serving. After years of homemade beer and wine competitions at the Oregon State Fair and Deschutes County Fair, they were compelled to cancel those competitions. The OLCC had dutifully checked the law. The Oregon Department of Justice had dutifully reported back. The verdict: Home-brew should be consumed in the home. Competitions, clubs and gifts to friends went from good times to outlaw status.

Legislators and the OLCC tried to come up with a temporary fix until the full Legislature can have at it, but the OLCC said Thursday that the law is the law. And to be sure, it would have been a strange brew to have the Department of Justice advising the OLCC that the law says no and the OLCC inventing a rule change to say yes.

The immediate issue may be a law that the Legislature needs to upgrade from Prohibition to 2010. But there is something more fundamentally wrong with the OLCC itself.

Established just after Prohibition ended, the OLCC was not a new start. It’s more like a perpetual Prohibition hangover.

In Oregon, the OLCC does the liquor buying and selling. Customers make purchases through the independent agents that run the OLCC stores. There’s nothing like a monopoly to ensure higher prices.

The OLCC is also shackled with too many sacred causes. It’s to promote liquor. It’s to bring in revenue. It’s to regulate.

We suppose that means that if the OLCC could walk into a bar, it would try to trick servers into selling to someone they should not, and then encourage everyone to drink and forget about that.

In other states, supermarkets and other stores manage to sell liquor just fine. Oregonians aren’t so dumb that they need the OLCC to be in charge.