A lot of personal-watercraft users will be ticked off, while fans of peace and safety will be delighted about a ruling this week by the state's highest court that says towns may indeed ban personal watercraft on lakes and ponds.

Well, fans of relative peace and safety, the law says that only personal watercraft may be banned, but other kinds of motorboats cannot.

Which is precisely the beef a Camden man had with the law. In 2005, Mark Haskell took his Sea Doo personal watercraft out on a lake where it and others like it had been banned, to protest the fact that the state allowed local residents to discriminate against his type of craft. He ended up in court arguing that it was unfair to ban personal watercraft while letting other motorized craft buzz around freely on lakes and ponds.

We disagree, and we're glad to see that the judges on the state's Supreme Judicial Court upheld the law.

Personal watercraft do share something with other motorized vessels -- they all go on the water and use engines to power them around.

But there the resemblance ends.

While there are some obnoxious motorboaters -- more and more of them, it seems -- they still are far outnumbered in the nuisance realm by wild, crazy and very noisy personal watercraft operators doing figure eights just when you've decided to take your afternoon swim.

Ask the paddlers, the anglers and the homeowners looking for a quiet afternoon on their dock what they think about personal watercraft and you'll likely get a bunch of answers unprintable in a family newspaper.

There are nice personal watercraft operators, to be sure. We know at least one. But the Legislature passed a law in 2005 allowing towns to ban such operators on the state's great ponds, and we're glad to see that law is legally defensible. May it stay on the books for a long time.