Little Transcript Help Over Here, Please

[Mikey]

If I do the following in a script:
put "north" into theButton
global status
put the hilite of bg button theButton into status

and check status, I get the value I expect, namely the hilite of the bg
button North.

However, if I
if the hilite of bg button theButton then

OR

if (the hilite of bg button theButton) then

I get a message execution error:  Error Description:  Chunk:  no such
object.

So if I combine both of these, status gets the value I would expect, but I
still get the error.

So what's wrong with my code, please?
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