Forget for the moment that oil and gasoline prices have been falling lately and that OPEC thinks it will take four years to restore energy demand that has been shattered by the recession.

Focus instead on signs that energy-derivatives trading in both the regulated and the unregulated "shadow markets" has been artificially inflating energy prices, despite that drop in demand.

We're not inclined to put a lot of stock in the broader, wilder conspiracy theories about energy, but we are relieved to see that federal regulators intend to at least try to get a handle on regulated energy derivatives, which may be used for risk management or for speculation.

Federal regulators will examine whether the government should impose limits on the number of futures contracts in oil and other energy commodities that can be held by speculative traders, the head of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission said Tuesday.

By law, the CFTC sets limits on the amount of futures contracts in some agricultural products that can be held by each market participant to protect the market against manipulation. But for energy commodities - crude oil, heating oil, natural gas, gasoline and other energy products - the futures exchanges themselves set the position limits if they choose to do so.

"It is incumbent upon the CFTC to ensure a fair and transparent price discovery process for all commodities," Chairman Gary Gensler said last week.

It's about time.

Reliable market observers say the speculative flow of money into commodities markets is a self-fulfilling prophecy that's distorting the usual process by which buyers and sellers set prices.

Oil traders and brokers have complained that institutional traders of all kinds have pumped billions of dollars into energy commodities and indexes - enough to artificially prop up energy prices.

In Congress, the House approved measures last fall to curb speculation and trading abuses in oil and other commodities markets, but they stalled in the Senate.

The Journal Star has published several stories in the past year describing investigations into the possible manipulation of prices of crude oil.

A hedge fund manager told Kevin G. Hall of McClatchy Newspapers earlier this year that when prices were about where they are now, but on the way up, big institutional investors were sucking the air out of the fragile economic recovery; their Wall Street partners were exempt from federal limits on how much they could bet on commodity prices.

So the least the Commodity Futures Trading Commission should do is treat regulated energy trading the way it treats trading in other commodities.

Furthermore, a year ago, Washington Post columnist Steven Pearlstein wrote: "There's lots the government could do to let the air out of the speculative bubble that accounts for much of the recent run-up in oil prices.

"Congress could close what is affectionately known as the Enron loophole and bring the massive market in commodities derivatives trading under the regulatory scrutiny of the Commodities Futures Trading Commission," Pearlstein concluded.

We agree. This is an issue not only of prudence but of national security.