Hey, it's 2015. Polygamy isn't OK anymore, anywhere

Keep a calendar handy when you talk about the crimes along the Arizona-Utah border.

It's not the year you have to check. It's the century.

With their "prophet" Warren Jeffs serving life in a Texas prison for sexually assaulting underage girls — his "spiritual wives" — the twin polygamous communities of Colorado City, Ariz., and Hildale, Utah, are an anachronism on steroids.

In this bastion of cult rule, young girls are forced into the harems of older men and young boys are driven out to reduce the competition for women. Law enforcement is an arm of the cult.

"This community has always been a theocracy," former Colorado City top cop Helaman Barlow told the Salt Lake Tribune.

Barlow was put on administrative leave from his job as chief marshal in April 2014, and was subsequently fired. Now, in exchange for immunity, he's cooperating with state and federal officials who continue investigating the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, which sees plural marriage as the way to a good seat in heaven.

Barlow confirms what FLDS watchers have long known: the police there serve the church, not public safety.

In addition to looking the other way when men took 16-year-old girls as plural wives, Barlow says he and other marshals followed a cult-devised early warning system to alert suspects if the FBI or other outside law enforcement arrived in town with a search warrant or subpoena.

Arizona Attorney General Mark Brnovich can become the third man in that office to try to force justice on these towns. He should do so with gusto.

Former AG Terry Goddard first took up the cause. Tom Horne repeatedly sought to replace FLDS marshals with county sheriffs.

Taking on Colorado City is a difficult and thankless task. The community is remote. It keeps a low profile. It protects its own.

What's more, the problems are so anachronistic that it's hard to remember this is really going on in 2015.

But it is happening, and it needs to be stopped.