Opinion

Send out the clowns

Forget Ringling Brothers and Barnum & Bailey. The ongoing battle over Long Island College Hospital is the biggest circus in town. And today the clowns are taking their act back to Supreme Court Justice Johnnie Lee Baynes’ Brooklyn Big Top.

Here’s the problem. Anyone with an ounce of fiscal sanity recognizes there’s no future for a full-service hospital there. But that hasn’t stopped the activists from getting the courts to intervene, rigging the bidding system and extending deadlines.

Brooklyn Health Partners, which won the initial round of bidding, is making a last-ditch effort to be reinstated. That’s not likely to happen, nor should it: BHP’s bid was so complicated by dubious financials and operating questions that even Mayor de Blasio and the community activists that once backed the group lost confidence.

But the key development could come on Thursday, when the activists and their lawyer, Jim Walden, will ask Justice Baynes to throw out the scores they didn’t like from the original bidding process (which was itself only arrived at after a fierce court battle).

The activists want to change the process because with Brooklyn Health Partners falling out, the likely winner will be the runner up — whose bid sensibly does not include a full-service hospital.

Look, there’s a reason no existing New York hospital has stepped up to take over this full-service facility. Up to now, Justice Baynes has bent over backwards to accommodate the jugglers, daredevils and clowns desperate to distract us from the fiscal and medical realities here.

Time to close down the three rings, send the clowns packing — and bring in a serious act.