I can understand being opposed to soaking a card to remove a stain, and I can see being in favor of soaking a card to remove a stain, provided (and this is perhaps just a hypothetical) that it does not modify the composition of the cardboard itself. I've enjoyed the various thought experiments posted in this thread but have neither seen nor thought of a good reason to privilege the use of one substance over another if its effect on the card is the same.
I don't know if the effect on the card is the same in practice, but if it is then what logical reason could there be to care if the soaking chemical is formaldehyde, cough syrup, water, gasoline, liquid nitrogen, or monkey semen? Either soaking is inherently okay or it is not. In theory, you are just removing molecules that were not previously there, and if that's the case then it's ethically equivalent to brushing off the molecules of a bread crumb that fell on the card; it's just harder to do.
My understanding, however, is that if the card has a stain, the staining itself is the result of an earlier chemical reaction with the cardboard, and so, whether you're removing it with distilled water in your living room or paying a restoration expert to use some other chemical to accomplish the same thing in a laboratory, either way you are necessarily altering the chemical structure of the stained card to return it to its clean state. That said, there are people on the board here with far more education in chemistry than I have, and I'll defer to them if any of my assumptions here are incorrect.
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