On its face, copper theft is a dumb crime, culprits breaking into homes, business or other areas to yank out that metal and sell it somewhere else. It’s just scummy.

Yet someone last week found a way to make that crime even scummier.

Wheeling police were called out to an Appalachian Power substation near Elm on Friday morning after someone had broken into it and absconded with the copper inside. That theft created another, much larger, problem.

With that copper gone, the substation went down. And at the outset, 7,700 Appalachian Power customers were without power.

Thanks to the company’s quick work, about 2,400 were back up in minutes. The rest had to wait hours.

That affected homes, schools, restaurants and other businesses from Elm Grove to Edgwood, from Bethlehem even into downtown Wheeling, according to the Appalachian Power outage map. Traffic lights went down in major intersections.

All because someone was looking to make a quick buck.

This wasn’t the first time someone swiped a bunch of copper. It likely won’t be the last. But it needs to be.

This crime has damaged homes and now it has shut down power grids. That can’t happen anymore. So how do you curtail it?

An easy solution is to make the punishment for that crime more harsh. The current punishment obviously isn’t enough to deter culprits. So make it hurt enough that someone who’s thinking about stealing copper or other precious metals to think twice — and think better of it.

Copper theft was taken to a new level of awful with the substation incident. Something must be done to reverse that.