It's an old, old story. Once-friendly neighbors get involved in a boundary dispute that gets out of hand. Angry words are exchanged, the neighbors stop talking, lawyers get hired and finally authorities have to settle it.

That appears to be where we're headed in our boundary dispute with Tennessee. By renewing long-dormant claims to a piece of the Volunteer State — a swath about a mile wide and 150 miles long — Georgia legislators have started something that has run a bit out of control.

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Technically, there's no question that the land was intended to be part of Georgia. By law, the border between the states was supposed to be drawn at the 35th parallel, which puts the current border about a mile too far south. If the border had been drawn accurately back in 1818, Georgia today would be larger by 150 square miles, and it would also have access to the waters of the bounteous Tennessee River.

Given North Georgia's situation, that water has become liquid gold. In fact, Georgia legislators privately suggest they have no interest in actually reclaiming territory. Their strategy is to use the issue as leverage. Once they get Tennessee into border negotiations, they hope to drop the boundary claim in return for Tennessee River water rights.

"Beginning discussions would be better all the way around than litigation," says state Sen. David Shafer (R-Duluth). "It would be a mistake to quickly dismiss the idea of discussions."

However, Shafer and other Georgia politicians forgot that their counterparts in Tennessee are also politicians. By publicly challenging Tennessee's border, they guaranteed that Tennessee legislators would respond in kind. In a resolution this week, the Tennessee Legislature rejected any possibility of border talks, condemning Georgia for what it called a "heinous assault on the sovereignty of Tennessee."

That puts the matter back in Georgia's hands. If we want to escalate matters, our only option is to go to the U.S. Supreme Court, which handles boundary disputes between states. And that may not be a good idea.

In the past, the court has consistently ruled in favor of maintaining historic boundaries even in cases where they clearly conflict with law. In 1990, for example, Georgia sued South Carolina over control of small islands in the Savannah River. All the legal documentation — including a treaty signed between Georgia and South Carolina back in 1787 — made it clear that those islands were Georgia territory.

However, Georgia had allowed South Carolina to treat the islands as its own for hundreds of years, granting citizens title to the property, taxing it and policing it. In effect, the Supreme Court ruled, Georgia had acquiesced in giving the islands to South Carolina no matter what some old documents said.

Shafer claims that the Tennessee case is different, arguing that Georgia has not acquiesced in the border change. He has documented at least nine occasions in the past 180 years in which Georgia's governor or General Assembly raised the question of a misdrawn boundary with Tennessee, and three occasions — in 1889, 1905 and 1915 — in which Tennessee officials acknowledged the line might be misdrawn.

The problem is that none of that ever came to anything. Georgia has known the line was misdrawn since 1827, but in all that time it never filed suit claiming sovereignty over those lands, never tried to tax or police that territory or its residents, and never gave those residents Georgia benefits such as in-state college tuition or HOPE scholarships.

In addition, over the years the state of Georgia has produced countless official maps — from highway maps published by the state Department of Transportation to congressional and legislative district maps approved by the General Assembly and signed by the governor — in which the border is drawn at its current location.

In other words, our problems are unlikely to be solved with a long straw into the Tennessee River. We're back to the basics — water conservation, better planning, more reservoirs.

• Jay Bookman is deputy editorial page editor. His column runs Monday and Thursday.