We’re in the middle of one of the hottest summer weekends in recent memory yet Lake Hopatcong remains closed to swimmers.

What can be done about that?

Well, if we could just pack the lake up and move it to Connecticut or New Hampshire, there would be no need to issue health advisories.

That’s not because the weather is cooler up there. It’s because the standards for cyanobacteria are different. The water that the New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection considers unsafe would be considered perfectly safe in the states to our north.

I learned that when I put in a call to a state senator whose district includes one of the towns on the lake. That’s Joe Pennacchio. He’s a Republican who got a degree in biology before going on to become a dentist.

If you like to discuss things like cyanobacteria and cytotoxins – and who doesn’t? – Pennacchio’s your man.

Pennacchio spent a couple days last week poking around in the science behind the decision last month by the state Department of Environmental Protection to issue a health advisory warning people not to come into contact with the waters of the lake.

“It’s not science,” he said. “It’s political science.”

The core of his argument is the state standards for cyanobacteria. These light-sensitive bacteria are perfectly natural and have been hanging around in lakes for 3.5 billion years, he informed me.

The problem arises when they start to multiply to the point they cause a bloom, or “Hazardous Algal Bloom” (HAB) in the parlance. That raises the question of when such a bloom becomes hazardous.

In New Jersey, a bloom is considered hazardous when the cell count reaches 20,000 per milliliter. In other states the standard is 70,000 to 100,000.

If Lake Hopatcong were in one of those states, said Pennacchio, swimmers and boaters would be enjoying a weekend on the water.

“They have environmentally conscious liberal administrations like we do,” he said. “You can’t say one state is more concerned with the environment than the other.”

But the real question is not cyanobacteria. It’s cytotoxins. These are the hazardous substances created when a HAB gets out of control.

“The actual cytotoxins, the poison that can hurt you, was within normal range,” he said.

The state DEP website says the same thing. So does Fred Lubnow of Princeton Hydro, the leading consulting firm in the field. Lubnow told me both his firm’s and the DEP’s measurements show that the water was within the state’s standards for cytotoxins.

So why the health advisories? Lubnow put a charitable spin on it.

He said the state DEP might be being “overly cautious.”

“Basically if I was at the lake and it looks really bad in one section but I went to another section of the lake I could see going on the lake in a boat or even going in the water,” he said.

So could I. When I was up there a week ago, the water looked fine at the state park where most of the swimming is done. Meanwhile the bacteria counts posted on the DEP site show that if the beach were in Connecticut there would be no cause for alarm.

So why the alarm here in Jersey?

Pennacchio says it’s about a bill recently signed into law known as a “rain tax.” It authorizes the creation of local authorities that can collect fees based on the potential runoff from private residential and commercial lots Pennacchio said the DEP may be using the lake closing to create pressure for the tax.

“Why are you closing down the lake?” he asked rhetorically. “Please don’t tell me that the point is to have the rain tax.”

I put that question to DEP’s media people, but didn’t get an answer.

And it could be that the DEP people have the best of intentions.

But if the state is going to hold our lakes to a higher standard than neighboring states, then the state should put up some money for long-term solutions for Hopatcong and other lakes, such as dredging and adding aeration systems, Pennacchio said.

“They own the lake,” said Pennacchio. “The constituents here pay a lot of money to the state for issues that don’t involve them. Now there’s an issue that involves them and there’s no money.”

Somebody better come up with some.

It’s certainly commendable that the state has in the last two years set up a comprehensive system for monitoring water quality. But if they’re going to insist on standards so much tighter than those in other states, then we’re going to see a lot more of these closures.

As for me, I’m just glad I live by the ocean.

The sharks might get me, but I’m safe from the cyanobacteria.

ADD - NANNY-STATE REGULATORS SHOULD LET THE SWIMMERS BEWARE

Pennacchio told me it seems like the DEP is going out of its way to spread panic about a relatively common hazard. The effort includes electronic signs on Interstates 80 and 287 warning that the state park is closed for swimming.

The reality is that swimmers have been going into that water for decades without being warned about the conditions. The state’s intense monitoring program began only in 2017.

Meanwhile the current levels at the main swimming area would not spark closures in many other states. According to the state website the most recent reading was on July 16. It was 35,000 cells per milliliter. There is no national threshold but that would be in the low-to-moderate risk category. Meanwhile the levels of the most hazardous materials - cytotoxins - were well below the risk threshold.

A simple solution would be to erect signs warning people to swim at their own risk. Instead the DEP imposed the closing on the entire lake.

They’re even warning people not to paddleboard or canoe. Those activities involve little or no contact with the water.

What these bureaucrats never consider is that life involves choices. With the weather so hot that people are dying of heatstroke, is a potential skin rash an unacceptable risk?

And even that is highly unlikely.

New York officials take a multifaceted approach. They look for visual evidence of a bloom - that green slime that is so easy to see - and combine it with analysis of the readings.

But if New Jersey is going to apply this one-size-fits all approach, the people who live in the lakes better get used to closures.

As for our state officials, they better get used to being asked why - if this situation is so hazardous - they spent decades ignoring it.

Virtually all of these lakes are in some way man-made. They need man-made solutions like dredging and aeration.

Just letting nature take its course is no acceptable.