Earth to Maglev Inc.: You’re wasting everybody’s time and money — mostly taxpayers’ — by seeking to reorganize “your” debts under Chapter 11 of the U.S. Bankruptcy Code. For if ever there were a case for a Chapter 7 filing — liquidation — this is it.

The company, based in McKeesport, long has dreamed of building a high-speed, magnetic-levitation train that would run 54 miles between Pittsburgh International Airport and Greensburg. It would not ride on steel wheels and rails but on a “cushion” of magnetic energy.

But this thing — and “thing” is the most charitable descriptive we can rustle up — has had “BOONDOGGLE” stamped all over it since first being proposed a decade ago.

There’s the current $5.2 billion price tag, certain to wildly escalate. “Cost-benefit”• Maglev does a disservice to the concept. While taxpayers already have been pickpocketed for millions of dollars in preliminary work, the federal government flatly rejected a request for $2.3 billion to build the first leg of the route from the airport to downtown Pittsburgh.

Equally telling is Maglev Inc.’s balance sheet — $50,000 or less in assets, about $600,000 in liabilities — quite meager sums for such a grandiose project. It can’t secure any lines of credit. And in typical fashion, it blames a lack of timely government funding for its fiscal woes.

Talk about bankrupt. If this were such a fantastic idea, where were the private investors?

If Maglev Inc. won’t convert its Chapter 11 filing to Chapter 7, the court should do so.

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