The Times reports that they want reopen the settlement they received from their anti-Facebook lawsuit, jopardizing the $150 million or so that it’s now worth.

…they say it’s not about the money, it’s about the principle — and vindication.

“The principle is that they didn’t fight fair,” said Tyler Winklevoss during an interview at a pub here recently. “The principle is that Mark [Zuckerburg] stole the idea.”

His brother, Cameron, chimed in, “What we agreed to is not what we got.”

This seems either the height of principle or the height of foolishness, or some combination of both. The twins may actually lose their money, which suggests that they are either really honorable or that they don’t particularly need it.

As for vindication—well, they will probably never get that, and it’s arguable that they should. I’m inclined to agree with them that Zuckerburg stole the grain of the Facebook idea, but who’s to say whether they would have taken it to the level that he clearly has. I doubt that anyone could train for the Olympics and build a hugely successful company at the same time.

They disagree.

When asked if they could have turned ConnectU into a site with hundreds of millions of users, like Mr. Zuckerberg did with Facebook, the twins replied in unison, “Absolutely.” They added that Mr. Zuckerberg deserved some credit for “not screwing up” and expanding Facebook into a community of 500 million users. But they believe the fame and fortune is undeserved.

Tyler Winklevoss said: “Mark is where he is because we approached him to include him in our idea.”

But that’s clearly not true…