Opinion

Begone, John Liu

Memo to city Comptroller John Liu: It’s a bit late to start a coverup.

In a holiday-weekend news dump, Liu announced he was returning “in excess of $20,000” in illegal campaign checks he took from phantom “straw donors.”

Liu’s next trick: returning that dirty money to donors who don’t even exist.

A Liu spokesman told The Post that such “refunds are a standard process in campaign committees.”

But there’s nothing “standard” about Queens contractor Dynasty Stainless Steel, where nine people listed as employees each gave $800 checks to Liu’s campaign.

Reporters found that Dynasty has only three living employees — so where did the other checks come from?

Well, said the campaign, “When a question is raised about a contribution, it is refunded.”

But refunded . . . to whom?

The phony donors who wrote Liu those checks were intermediaries; Liu is returning the money to straw donors because it was never theirs to begin with.

Question is: Do these donors get to keep the cash, or do they have to give it back to the crooked financiers who were the real source of the money?

We don’t ask this in jest. The question shows how impossible it will be for Liu to dig himself out of this mess.

As The Post reported last week, Liu received $29,600 in fishy donations from low-paid maids, clerks and truck drivers employed by or closely tied to New York’s budget-hotel king, Sam Chang.

Some 13 employees at Chang’s McSam Hotel Group and his Comfort Inn in Flushing dropped $800 each into Liu’s coffers. Over at W&L Construction, which has worked on properties Chang developed, 19 more employees gave Liu $800 each, for a total haul of more than $15,000.

If Liu returns those donations, he’s essentially admitting that he knows Sam Chang & Co. were the real source of that funny money.

But if he keeps the Chang checks, he’s holding on to donations that seem mighty likely to be illegal.

Either way, it looks like Liu is in a fix.

Fact is, this man has no business playing any role in city government — least of all as comptroller, where he’s trusted to oversee the city’s $65 billion budget and billions more in pension investments.

Which is why he needs to drop the act and resign immediately.

Things are only going to get uglier for John Liu from here on. He should spare the city the taint of his presence and get himself gone. Now.