Opinion

Still a Liu Liu

Under an ethics cloud and the subject of a two-year federal investigation for possible campaign-finance fraud, John Liu is finally talking to prosecutors.

Trouble is, the morally obtuse city comptroller isn’t talking to the right ones.

Liu’s office released an audit Wednesday of the city’s project to upgrade the 911 call system — accusing contractor Hewlett-Packard of up to $163 million in possibly fraudulent overcharges and asking DA Cy Vance to look deeper into the affair.

“We found the city grossly mismanaged the project,” said Liu, who declared in a press release that the city had “picked taxpayers’ pockets” with poor oversight.

Well, we’ve got a suggestion for Liu: He should try auditing his mouth next time.

Federal prosecutors have been investigating Liu for years for allegedly having — not to put too fine a point on it — “picked taxpayers’ pockets” to the tune of thousands of dollars to fund his campaigns.

The feds have already arrested his former campaign treasurer and a top moneyman for arranging networks of so-called “straw donors” — individuals who make political donations in their own names using other people’s money, which triggers matching donations from a public pot.

Up to $1,050 per donor.

So if Liu is really worried about discovering New York’s worst pickpockets, maybe he can call a meeting of his campaign staff.

Not surprisingly, Mayor Bloomberg disputes just about every word of the audit.

“This is a new level of intellectual dishonesty that we haven’t even seen before,” he said Friday. “This is a contract that was registered with the comptroller’s office and finished under the budget approved by his office.”

And the truth is, every Liu audit needs to be regarded as an exercise in political theater. That was clear again Wednesday, when he announced his report on the 911 upgrade while surrounded by the city’s labor leaders — his chief political allies and financial backers.

Audits are about crunching the numbers, not locking arms with union bosses. But Liu isn’t a trustworthy CFO for the city; the record speaks eloquently to that sad fact.

It may well be that the city mishandled the 911 project; it is, after all, running seven years late and has seen its estimated budget balloon continually.

But it’s impossible to trust this audit, given the source. Liu has no standing to adjudicate right and wrong in fiscal affairs. He long ago lost any measure of credibility.

He needs to get gone.