Two terrible child-abuse cases this summer had made the Children’s Administration of DSHS look bad enough. A new one makes it look even worse.

In June, The News Tribune documented the horrifying case of a girl who was apparently tortured at the hands of her foster mother for 10 years – despite numerous complaints to Child Protective Services.

That was followed almost immediately by a report that an adoptive mother had starved and beaten children for many years, leaving a 7-year-old dead in 2005 – weighing 28 pounds. Again, DSHS caseworkers had failed to pick up on a pattern of cruelty.

Those cases involved some abuse complaints from years ago. Recent reforms – like responding far more rapidly to reports of mistreatment – might conceivably have made a difference.

But there’s no such excuse for a very recent blunder involving a 12-year-old South Hill boy. According to police, the boy told them he’d been brutally tormented for years by his step-grandmother, who shared custody of him with his maternal grandfather.

The abuse, he said, included beating his soles until he couldn’t walk, scalding him with hot water and scratching his legs with a fork – then pouring vinegar into the wounds. He also said that his grandfather had recently punched him in the stomach for leaving a leaf blower on the garage floor.

That’s another case of abuse reports – some of them from schools – going unheeded for years. But even after CPS workers seemingly wised up and pulled the boy from his grandparents’ “care” last June, they were appallingly oblivious to his predicament. They actually returned him to the home. The boy was rescued only when Pierce County sheriff’s deputies found out that he was back there; they took him into protective custody. The grandfather and stepgrandmother now face charges of assaulting a child.

This week, sheriff’s spokesman Ed Troyer asked a good question: When people suspect a child is being abused, why don’t they call the police instead of CPS, given this kind of performance?

Certainly the police should be involved quickly when reports of abuse come in. Gregoire on Wednesday said she has ordered DSHS to come up with clear guidelines on how to do that.

The larger question is why some supposedly professional caseworkers are still making such appalling errors of judgment.

As Gregoire noted, legions of caseworkers won’t do any good if they don’t have the sense to recognize when a child is in grave peril and do something serious about it.

Once again, DSHS officials are talking about a “system” that failed. But this system consists of people. When those people fail so disastrously, they need to be disciplined, reassigned, shown the door – whatever it takes to remove incompetents from the job of protecting children.