The home stretch grew a little rockier for Gifford Miller Wednesday, as he prepares for next week’s primary with less cash in hand thanks to a decision by the Campaign Finance Board and, now, by a justice of the Supreme Court of New York County. Justice Jacqueline W. Silbermann denied Mr. Miller’s request for an injunction that would have forced the board to fork over the last installment of public financing to his campaign. The board pulled the plug on the cash Tuesday amid questions about whether Mr. Miller exceeded spending limits.

Mr. Miller had claimed that the $600,000 his campaign spent on a petition drive to establish a “Smaller Class Sizes” ballot line shouldn’t count as a campaign expense against the $5.7 million spending limit that’s a condition of public financing. Neither the board nor the justice was prepared to credit this argument, despite Mr. Miller’s bellyaching that the rules had been changed in midstream.

A moral lurks in this story for any other candidates who opt in to a scheme, such as our public campaign financing, that forcibly extracts taxes from the highest taxed citizens in the nation and requires that it be spent on the campaigns of politicians of a sort with whom many don’t agree. If one is going to go into such an arrangement, one had better be ready to live by the rules, however confusing and sometimes nonsensical they may seem. That money is paid for with free speech rights.

Justice Silbermann had Mr. Miller’s number, sure as could be. She wrote that Mr. Miller “is not being deprived of freedom of speech; rather, he is being held to a bargain which he entered into with the Board, when he agreed to accept public financing of his campaign in exchange for agreeing to abide by its rules. If he did not understand its rules or found them to be ambiguous, his remedy was to seek clarification in a timely manner, rather than to proceed at his own risk.”