In an editorial and a blog post this month, we told you about Roger Chapin and his fishy charities for veterans.

They have lavished millions of donated dollars on administrative expenses, salaries, and perks while sending only a relative trickle to charitable services that sound highly dubious, like sending overseas troops a shipment of 1.5 million telephone cards that could be used only to call for sports scores, not to talk to family members.

Things looked bad then, but now they look worse.

Interested readers should look at this article in Forbes by William Barrett, who has done a lot of digging into Mr. Chapin and found a lot of muck. Mr. Barrett points readers to a scathing report on one of Mr. Chapin’s charities, the Coalition to Salute America’s Heroes, by the Better Business Bureau Wise Giving Alliance.

It slams the coalition for failing to meet basic standards of accountability and truthfulness:

During 2007, the following statement appeared on the CSAH web site: ‘Ninety-six percent of all money contributed goes directly to service-members and their families.’ However, the 96% figure is not supported by CSAH’s 2006 audit report. The audit shows that of the $5.4 million cash contributions received, less than 25% went directly to service members and their families.

And it also raises a troubling question about those sports-score cards.

Apparently, the USO of Metropolitan Washington, which supposedly got the biggest shipment of 1 million cards, says it never got any. And as for the other half-million cards, no one seems sure exactly where they went.

Mr. Chapin and an official of the Coalition sent letters to The Times defending themselves, but it seems telling that they chose not to rebut the contentions made by us or their critics in Congress, other than to say they did good work and we were wrong not to praise them for it.

We have two thoughts about that.

1. People who want to help veterans should do so, but carefully. There are lots of good, honest, charities out there, and various nonprofit watchdogs can help you find them, like the Better Business Bureau, Charity Navigator, and Guidestar.

2. We think the New York Attorney General, Andrew Cuomo, should make an effort to learn a lot more about the Coalition, which is based in Ossining, N.Y.