The third non-short-seller on the SEC’s hit list is Sam Antar’s ex-wife. And that’s where it gets really strange. The thousands of pages on the ex-Mrs. Antar that the SEC wrested from Sam had nothing to do with any companies Antar or Minkow have written about. The SEC wanted all the court records from Antar’s recent divorce case. Every single page, no matter how absurdly irrelevant. The SEC was adamant.

What is going on here? Well, I think what we may be seeing is a repeat of the Einhorn fiasco, and then some.

Both Einhorn and Minkow are short-sellers, profiting from their probes into the finances of companies. Short-sellers provide an undeniable benefit for the markets and perform a function that the SEC often fumbles: Shorts, and whistleblowers like Antar, police the financial statements of companies, providing a skeptical view of stocks that they believe are overvalued or otherwise flawed. Antar takes pride in the accounting goofs and crookedness that he has brought to the SEC’s attention, directly and through his blog.

Antar has worked with Minkow on a few of the stocks that FDI has targeted, but he has always disclosed to the SEC—“in real time,” he says—and in his blog, the times that he has taken stock positions or been compensated for his forensic accounting work. There’s nothing illegal about short-selling or working with short-sellers, compensated or not, as long as the securities laws aren’t violated, and it’s hard to see what exactly the SEC finds is so awful that these guys have done. An SEC spokesman, citing policy, declined to comment.

Antar has flown around the country at his own expense lecturing law enforcement a la Frank Abignale of Catch Me If You Can fame, so he is teed off. He believes that the SEC is trying to bully and embarrass him and that the investigation was instigated by companies targeted by FDI.

One of those companies, Medifast, has told Dow Jones News Service that it did complain to the SEC about Minkow. However, a spokesman for Pre-Paid Legal told me that the company “has not filed a complaint or contacted the SEC” about Minkow or FDI. The rest aren’t commenting or didn’t respond to requests for comment. Dan Macouga, a spokesman for Usana, wouldn’t comment on the SEC probe, citing the company’s recent settlement of a lawsuit against Minkow, but speculated that “everyone probably alerted the SEC after [Minkow] started what he was doing.”

What makes this all even worse than the Einhorn mess is that the SEC is probing the two men’s contacts with those two Dow Jones reporters. That can’t help but have a chilling effect on the ability of the financial press to do its job. The agency has rules strictly limiting subpoenas to the media. Similar rules are needed to keep it from engaging in fishing expeditions aimed at people talking to the press.

Investigative journalist Chris Byron said a few years ago that journalists are the SEC’s “seeing eye dogs.” The same can be said of the likes of Sam Antar and Barry Minkow. This probe raises the specter of a Securities and Exchange Commission that has, yet again, been led down the garden path, manipulated to waste resources on a wild goose chase aimed at the very people it needs to help police the markets.