If someone crept onto your neighborhood school playground late at night and spray-painted dirty words on the blacktop, would you leave the graffiti there for your children to read?

Hopefully not. You’d clean it up or paint it over right away — and then you’d go looking for the vandal with punishment on your mind.

You would turn a deaf ear to silly arguments that your children have read these dirty words before now. You would reject faulty logic about the culprit’s disadvantaged upbringing or political passions, or the fact he uses such language with his older friends when they congregate in other locations, or that even you and your friends use such language elsewhere. That’s all irrelevant: this is your kids’ playground — a safe place and refuge for innocent children.

On Sunday, we awoke to discover that someone we trusted had vandalized our playground — “dirty words” had been scrawled in plain sight in a syndicated Sunday comic strip.

We elected to maintain a standard. Call us old-fashioned for doing so. The comics pages are a domain of young people — a refuge for innocent children, very much like a playground.

In the Butler Eagle and countless other newspapers, the Sunday funny papers are an American institution. Invented shortly after the introduction of the high-speed color printing press, the funnies date back more than a century to the media wars between news titans William Randolph Hearst and Joseph Pulitzer.

Throughout the decades, the funnies have been a device to attract and introduce young readers. The comics give children a stake in the game — a pride of ownership in the high-stakes news of an ever-changing geopolitical world.

The funnies always have been presumed to be a children’s medium — indeed, the Butler Eagle is a family newspaper that embraces a standard of decency that its readers can trust.

It’s true, adult themes are introduced here, with Dick Tracy and Mary Worth tucked in between Popeye and Pogo. But it’s always been the young reader’s discretion to choose which strips to follow and which to leave until they’re a year or two older.

That certainly was not the spirit of the “Easter egg” so nonchalantly concealed in Sunday’s Non Sequitur comic.

Sometimes it’s a struggle maintaining a consistent standard. The world is ever-changing. Also ever-changing are competing media outlets — television, social media, on-demand, online and entertainment channels included.

Some have criticized our decision on the logic that an ever-changing world has already introduced children to such words — that modern media have, in effect, already stolen their innocence. We prefer another perspective. We promote a culture that upholds and values the innocence of children in an age that tends to do the opposite.