Oklahoma Attorney General Drew Edmondson's Big Chicken suit looks set to keep stinking up Oklahoma City awhile longer.

Edmondson is so intent on wringing a multi-million dollar ruling for the state and its lawyers against the country's biggest chicken producers that he's passing up a winnable shot at the U.S. Senate, we report today.

Good news for the lawyers who could reap a bonanza if Edmondson's suit against 14 major chicken producers succeeds, we've already noted. Bad news for Oklahoma business.

The attorney general started pursuing Arkansas-based Big Chicken-owned producers six years ago. Now, after key legal victories, he no doubt smells blood. Higher office can wait - Big Chicken, charged with polluting popular waterways in Oklahoma's northeast, looks ripe for the final kill, he appears to have decided.

The suit's biggest winners so far are the lawyers Edmondson hired on a contingency basis to represent the state against Big Chicken. Miller & Keffer; Riggs, Abney, Neal, Turpen, Orbison & Lewis; and Motley Rice now stand to collect up to one-third of any financial award the state wins in the suit after a recent ruling.

Longer term, business will suffer under the AG. Earlier this year he killed tort reform in the state by persuading Gov. Brad Henry, a fellow Democrat, not to sign a package of civil-litigation changes the state's businesses had solidly supported.

Conservative commentators like Oklahoma City University law professor Andrew Spiropoulos reacted by saying Edmondson behaves as AG as if he were "the state's chief plaintiffs' lawyer." Such approach "undermines the fair and impartial administration of justice," he pointed out.

Edmondson is still rumored around Oklahoma as a Democratic candidate for either governor or U.S. senator in 2010, when he is eligible to re-run as state AG. Watch this space on that.