The people in charge of tidying up the language have been saying for years that “the banality of evil” is a worn-out cliche — used, overused and misused by hacks like us who are intent on making literary mountains out of rhetorical molehills.

They have been hectoring us about it for years, and every time they just about have us convinced, some shocking, sordid event comes down the pike to make us dust off the phrase and trot it out one more time.

This time it is the string of church fires in East Texas that began New Year’s Day and ended — it is to be hoped — with the arrest and arraignment this week of two young Texas men.

Authorities say 10 fires and three church break-ins have been cleared with the arrest of Daniel George McAllister, 21, and Jason Robert Bourque, 19, a couple of East Texas running buddies with otherwise spotless criminal records. (Bourque is an Eagle Scout, his attorney said at Monday’s arraignment.)

Monday’s court proceeding charged the pair with just one of the fires, but Texas Ranger Brent Davis said statements by McAllister have implicated both men in all 13 incidents, which took place over hundreds of square miles in Smith, Van Zandt and Henderson counties.

While the lawmen are confident that they have the culprits, they are still casting about for a motive. McAllister may have confessed to the deeds, but he is apparently keeping his own counsel as to why they were done. Bourque, whose family has retained a locally prominent defense lawyer to represent him, is reportedly remaining silent about everything. They appear to be nothing more than dull, loutish lay-abouts, the kind of young men who troll country roads in pickup trucks and lie about their alcoholic and sexual exploits.

Law officers are confident that they know who committed these evil and senseless acts, but they also want to know why they were committed. We wish them luck, but we are not confident that they will ever find an answer. No matter who is eventually found to have set out on this systematic campaign to torch East Texas churches, we’d bet that the motives for it will remain murky.

This is where “the banality of evil” comes in. The phrase was coined in 1963 by writer and political theorist Hannah Arendt. It was contained in the subtitle of her book, Eichmann in Jerusalem, an account of the public trial of Adolf by the Israeli government on charges that he was the chief operational officer in charge of Hitler’s Holocaust, the “final solution” that ended up killing 6 million Jews.

Arendt’s thesis, formed after watching the boring and unengaged Eichmann sit for weeks in his bulletproof glass dock as witnesses recounted the horrors of the Third Reich, was that much of the world’s worst evil is not done by mesmerizing demagogues, but by dull, faceless schlubs who are simply going about the business of doing what they are told.

We do not mean for a moment to equate the burning of 10 Texas churches with the murder of 6 million Jews, but the mind that can carry out such a string of arsons seems to us as dead as the mind of a man who can blithely pore over the logistics of genocide.

Even with McAllister’s reported confession, both he and Bourque enjoy at this moment in time the presumption of innocence that our justice system affords to all criminal defendants, and our purpose today is not to pronounce guilt upon these two young men. It is to comment upon the mentality that produces such a heinous and at the same time meaningless crime. Men with dead minds and dead souls commit such crimes.

Hannah Arendt’s phrase may be a cliche almost half a century after she wrote it, but there is a reason such phrases become cliches — there is a truth in them that cannot be denied — not in a hundred years; not with a million repetitions.