If you think the film remake of “True Grit” is the only example of a Wild West scenario playing out in Pennsylvania right now ... well, guess again, pardner.

The Keystone State has provided an open range for natural gas drillers, in terms of limited regulation, freedom from taxation and permission to treat and discharge the ultra-briny, metal-laden wastewater from the “fracking” process into the waterways from which we drink.

According to a report by The Associated Press, one energy company, Cabot Oil & Gas, trucked more than 44,000 barrels of fracking wastewater to a sewage plant in Hatfield Township, Montgomery County, which was treated and released into the Neshaminy Creek, which empties into the Delaware River. That bypassed regulations prohibiting any such effluent from gas-drilling to enter the Delaware River Basin.

The AP also found that over 12 months, state regulators couldn’t document the method of disposal for 1.28 million barrels of the 6 million barrels of fracking wastes during that period.

State officials say the treatment of fracking wastes at Hatfield didn’t produce any harm — discharge standards were not exceeded. Yet the AP report indicated that barium and strontium in the drilling wastes, reacting with chlorine used to treat drinking water, creates trihalomethanes, a carcinogen. The fact that the Neshaminy Creek meets the Delaware River below Easton and Phillipsburg (which get their water from the river) is of little comfort. The bigger question is whether all the rivers of Pennsylvania are in danger of pollution given the huge volumes of wastewater produced by fracking and Pennsylvania’s late-to-the-game approach to preventing this pollution.

It is a public disgrace that:

Pennsylvania is the only state that allows treated fracking wastes to be disposed of in surface waters. Other states require it be injected deep underground, from where it came.

Pennsylvania is the only major gas-producing state that gives energy companies a free ride on an extraction tax. Last year the Legislature punted on bills to enact a tax and dedicate it to environmental regulation and for communities bearing the brunt of a gas boom and its potential leftovers.

What more will it take for incoming Gov. Tom Corbett and the Legislature to act? We’ve seen homes with spigots that can be ignited, fracking wastes escaping onto land and into streams, and wastes discharged into the Delaware, despite assurances it wouldn’t happen. The Delaware River Basin Commission has placed a moratorium on natural gas drilling in the watershed, but it has started the rule-drafting process to allow drilling. Given the environmental side effects so far, the DRBC should keep the moratorium in place.

Residents must demand that their governor and legislators represent their interests in clean water along with safe, well-regulated energy production. Those are not mutually exclusive forces, but if you look at the industry money that was poured into the gubernatorial and legislative campaigns in 2010 — a sum approaching $1 million to Corbett alone — gas money easily drowned out common sense. Corbett continues to say an extraction tax would choke economic growth and job creation.

The truth is, this gas is going to be pumped out of Pennsylvania — with a tax or without.

It is a public embarrassment that a state that provides drinking water to millions of people — many of them in other states — is demonstrating to Texas, Oklahoma and other gas-producers what a modern frontier really looks like.

Wahoo.