Using Matlab to tell if cone of uncertainty is in a county

I am a VERY basic programmer and I am attempting to use the mapping toolbox to tell whether the "cone of uncertainty" for a hurricane is within a county. My project area is the Gulf Coast of the USA and I would like to know how far from the center of the cone a county within the cone is located. In my code I have initialized the counties and have a cone of uncertainty for Hurricane Irene with the given shape files. How can I use this information to get distances of the counties from the cone.

clc
clear

shape = shaperead('al092011.017A_5day_pgn.shp');

MapLatLimit = [20 45];
MapLonLimit = [-95 -60];

gulfstates = shaperead('usastatelo', 'UseGeoCoords', true, ...
   'BoundingBox', [MapLonLimit' MapLatLimit']);

counties = shaperead('tl_2012_us_county.shp', 'UseGeoCoords', true, ...
   'BoundingBox', [MapLonLimit' MapLatLimit']);

geoshow(shape, 'FaceColor', 'Red')
geoshow(gulfstates, 'DisplayType', 'polygon', 'FaceColor','none')
geoshow(counties)

title('Irene Cone of Uncertainty')

Thank you for your help!