Now that the state Department of Environmental Resources has cleared its sinuses, perhaps it will open its eyes.

The regulator, which long had been impervious to noxious odors emanating from the massive and growing Keystone Sanitary Landfill, recently cited the landfill nine times for odor violations in response to 230 complaints.

Tellingly, not all of those complainants live near the landfill. The complaints came not only from Dunmore and Throop, the two boroughs that host the landfill, but from Scranton, south of the landfill; Archbald and Olyphant, north of the landfill; and Elmhurst, Jefferson and Roaring Brook townships, to the landfill’s east and southeast.

Over the past several years, the DEP has fielded hundreds of such complaints but infamously has failed to detect the noxious odors, while concluding the landfill and its planned massive expansion would not have a negative effect on public health or property values.

Ideally, the citations indicate not only that the DEP has regained its olfactory senses, but that the agency has begun to take a more realistic look at the landfill’s adverse impact on the region.

The DEP irresponsibly has approved the landfill’s massive, 40-year-plus expansion plan, under which it would add more than 90 million tons of mostly out-of-state garbage to the millions of tons that already create the smell that the DEP finally has managed to detect.

If the landfill stinks now, what will it smell like 90 million tons of garbage from now?

And this is not the case of the landfill having a bad day or a bad week. The complaints that led to the citation were filed from Sept. 1 through Jan. 20.

Most of that period also predates the recent change in the state administration. But Gov. Josh Shapiro, during his gubernatorial campaign and during his six years as attorney general, was critical of the DEP’s performance in several areas.

There is no reason to believe the agency rose above that performance when it approved the landfill expansion, which local civic and environmental advocates have appealed to the Environmental Hearing Board.

Shapiro should order the DEP to review that unwarranted approval, taking the odor citations as a whiff of long-term inevitably if the expansion proceeds, rather than a one-time regulatory violation.