Opinion

Some fine wannabes

Public Advocate Bill de Blasio may have had to have his fingernails pulled out, but he finally owned up to his campaign’s illegal behavior — which is more than potential mayoral rivals Bill Thompson and John Liu can say.

After years of legal battles, mostly over flimsy technicalities, de Blasio agreed to pay $300,000-plus in fines and interest for the thousands of posters that his campaign illegally plastered around the city in 2009.

But Liu, now city comptroller, and Thompson, his predecessor in that post, are still frantically trying to skirt more than $1 million between them in similar fines.

The behavior of all three men is shameful — given that each has his eyes on City Hall come 2013, and each freely admits that what his campaign did was illegal.

They just don’t want to pay the bill.

Real role models, huh?

Liu — hit for $528,225 in fines — initially got most of his 8,000-plus summonses thrown out because they’d been served on the wrong campaign staffer or because the Sanitation Department couldn’t supply the summons number.

Sanitation re-served the summonses — but Liu is fighting them, anyway, saying they should’ve been mailed to an address in New York City, not Albany.

Thompson tried to wiggle out by saying that whoever posted the signs illegally had violated specific instructions from campaign officials — a claim rightly dismissed as nonsense by a judge.

And de Blasio’s well-connected election-law lawyers claimed his summonses were invalid because the agent who mailed them hadn’t personally affixed the postage.

It’s all niggling nonsense, and it insults the intelligence of all New York voters.

Again, not one of the three has ever denied that his campaign illegally defaced public property — thousands of times each.

They’re just trying to evade responsibility for their misdeeds.

At least de Blasio has now decided to own up to it — sort of, anyway.

He says he’ll pay the fines not because it’s the right thing to do or because a would-be chief executive of the city needs to obey the law, but because “this felt more and more like a distraction.”

Whatever.

None of the three has done his mayoral prospects any good by the shameful way he’s handled this.

That particularly holds true for Liu and Thompson — who still fail to understand what taking responsibility means.