THE LAST WORD:

A lot of smart people never saw it coming.

When the sub-prime mortgage crisis caved in Wall Street stalwart Lehman Brothers in September it ranked up there with shocks like, “The unsinkable Titanic did what?”

Oh well. We can’t all be financial seers like Pimco’s Bill Gross.

So you can’t blame Costa Mesa officials for having $5 million invested in Lehman. A lot of other savvy folks lost their shirts as well.

But here’s a bright idea: What if all the other public agencies in the area teamed up to recover their losses from Lehman in bankruptcy court?

Costa Mesa Finance Director Marc Puckett deserves credit for organizing 32 public agencies that had $700 million in Lehman, and together they will fight for their money back without gumming up the works with duplicative efforts.

That’s what we call making the best of a bad situation.