U.S. Attorney General Loretta Lynch faces the toughest decision of her short tenure — whether to heed the recommendation of two inspectors general to open a criminal investigation into whether Hillary Clinton mishandled sensitive government information on a personal email account she secretly maintained as secretary of state.

Clinton, the prohibitive favorite for the 2016 Democratic presidential nomination, was understandably distraught by news reports of the possible "criminal" probe of her handling of State Department emails.

That explains why her campaign pressured the New York Times, which broke the story, to change its original headline — from "Criminal Inquiry Sought in Hillary Clinton's Use of Email" to "Criminal Inquiry Is Sought in Clinton Email Account" — so that the former secretary of state did not appear to be the actual target of the possible Justice Department investigation.

It is against that backdrop that Lynch will decide whether an assessment by Charles McCullough, inspector general for the intelligence community, and Steve Linick, the State Department's inspector general, merits a full investigation.

We think it does.

Indeed, Clinton has previously asserted that she did not use the secret email account — which she maintained on a private email server housed at her New York home — to either send or receive classified information.

But after sampling but 40 of her emails, McCullough found that "four contained classified (intelligence community) information," he informed Congress.

Moreover, he said, State Department officials handling Freedom of Information Act requests told him that "there are potentially hundreds of classified emails within the approximately 30,000 provided by former Secretary Clinton."

That's not to say that Clinton knowingly sent or received classified emails. In fact, McCullough acknowledged that none of the classified emails his office discovered "had classification or dissemination markings."

So it is quite possible Clinton did not know she was handling classified material which, according to the intelligence community IG, should have been transmitted "via a secure network," rather than Clinton's personal server.

We confess that we are not especially confident that Lynch will sign off on a criminal investigation in the mishandling of Clinton's emails.

But if, as Clinton has maintained since news of it broke, she wants the American people to know the whole truth about her secret email account as secretary of state, she should welcome a Justice Department inquiry.

REPRINTED FROM THE ORANGE COUNTY REGISTER