Despite Republicans complaining that Monday's Georgia election-related indictments amount to massive prosecutorial overreach, at least a few of the charges appear focused, straightforward, and reasonable. Here's the irony: Those indictments charge the defendants with the very thing they spent months falsely accusing the other side of doing: committing election fraud by, among other things, working to gain illicit access to and tampering with voting machines.

Former President Donald Trump himself was indicted on charges of conspiracy and racketeering, definitions of which can be imprecise enough that overzealous prosecutors can misuse them. Some forms of conspiracy are real crimes, though, for good reason. As for applying it to a former president: Nobody is above the law, but in such a societally fraught case, prosecutors shouldn't push into gray areas.

So, let’s wait for the evidence on Trump, but the more straightforward offenses — if proved in court law — should be punished.

Those offenses are outlined in counts 32 through 37 of the 41 indictment counts promulgated by District Attorney Fani Willis and 23 grand jurors, and in acts 42 through 55 of the broad racketeering count. They charge “Kraken” attorney Sidney Powell and three local Georgia associates with conspiring to "willfully tamper with electronic ballot markers and tabulating machines."

Now, these are real underlying crimes, provable or disprovable without resort to abstruse legal theory. Powell either did or did not pay other people to access voting machines illegally.

And this is not some fuzzy, gray-area racketeering charge. Contracting with someone to tamper with voting machines is a crime by itself. Conspiracy law is not needed to prosecute it, just as conspiracy law is not needed when someone hires a hit man to commit murder . (Of course, the voting-machine crime is many degrees of magnitude less severe, but the point of cause and effect is the same.) Likewise, suborning perjury is a crime almost as bad as perjury itself. There is no First Amendment right to hire or directly coerce somebody else to break a law.

A crime such as this (if it indeed happened and the proof is there) should be prosecuted and punished, regardless of whether or not it is allegedly part of a conspiracy, and it should be prosecuted even if the larger racketeering charges are bogus.

Moreover, it is particularly galling that the very lawyer, Sidney Powell, who yelled the loudest (and the most untruthfully) about Trump opponents supposedly monkeying with voting machines is part of the only gang that actually (apparently provably) monkeyed with such machines.

If the partisan actors had been reversed — if the outgoing Obama team in early 2017 had improperly accessed voting machines while trying to help Hillary Clinton be declared the victor — virtually every Republican in America, along with honest Democrats, would have yelled in fury. And almost nobody on the Right would have accepted the explanation that they were “just checking for accuracy.” Just as when former President Bill Clinton met then-Attorney General Loretta Lynch on an airport tarmac while his wife was being investigated, the appearance itself is justifiably more than suspicious.

It was a very, very bad thing for Trump’s operation to try to reverse duly certified election results. While it is wrong to criminalize many of the steps taken during that attempt, it also would be wrong not to prosecute offenses that were indeed criminal — no matter whose ox is gored.

Somewhere between an overzealous prosecutor and an over-impassioned defense of the indefensible, the real work of law and justice should proceed.