Looking for a way to mark margin

Question

Per the formatting requirements for a specific proposal, I need a way to mark sections of the documents (possibly breaking across pages) with asterisk symbols going down both margins. Ideally I would like to be able to do a \begin and \end command to make the section and not guess it's length. Something along the lines of this:

*  Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing    *
*  elit, sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore et   *
*  dolore manga aliqua. Ut enim ad minim veniam, quis    *
*  nostrud exercitation ullamco laboris nisi ut aliquip  *
*  ex ea commodo *consequat. Duis aute irure dolor in    *

Answer 1

Update: Another try with fancypar:

\documentclass[a4paper]{article}
\usepackage{lipsum}
\usepackage{parskip}
\usepackage{fancypar}
\makeatletter
\define@choicekey+[FP]{fancypar}{position}[\val\nr]{left,right,both}{%
  \ifcase\nr\relax
    \def\FancyMarkPosition{\llap{\mbox{\FancyMark\quad}}\box\linebox}
  \or
    \def\FancyMarkPosition{\box\linebox\rlap{\mbox{\quad\FancyMark}}}
  \or
    \def\FancyMarkPosition{\llap{\mbox{\FancyMark\quad}}\box\linebox\box\linebox\rlap{\mbox{\quad\FancyMark}}}
  \fi
}{%
  \PackageWarning{fancypar}{erroneous input ignored}%
}
\makeatother
\usepackage{environ}
\NewEnviron{stars}{%
  \MarkedPar[mark=$\star$, position=both]{\BODY}%
}
\begin{document}
\begin{stars}
    \lipsum[1]
\end{stars}
\end{document}

---

Until someone comes up with a nice answer, here is a quick and dirty hack:

Using Werner's answer here, I abused the mechanism of lineno to print stars instead of numbers in the margin.

\documentclass[a4paper]{article}
\usepackage{lipsum}
\usepackage{parskip}
\usepackage{lineno}
\makeatletter
\def\makeLineNumberLeft{%
  \llap{\hb@xt@\linenumberwidth{$\star$\hss}\hskip\linenumbersep}% left line number
  \hskip\columnwidth% skip over column of text
  \rlap{\hskip\linenumbersep\hb@xt@\linenumberwidth{\hss$\star$}}\hss}% right line number
\leftlinenumbers% Re-issue [left] option
\makeatother
\begin{document}
\begin{linenumbers}
    \lipsum[1]
\end{linenumbers}
\end{document}