One of the streaks to Mayor Bloomberg’s personality is that he has a hard time keeping his attention on the drudgery of governing. The most famous default was in 2010, when he was sunning himself in Bermuda during the mammoth blizzard that immobilized the city. We have the sense of a similar catastrophe building around the stop, question, and frisk lawsuit. The city’s handling of the legal appeal in the case has been so lackadaisical as to raise the question of whether the corporation counsel — or the mayor himself — really wants to win. One could almost imagine that someone is prepared to throw the case.

That might seem preposterous. The mayor was visibly angry when, with Police Commissioner Ray Kelly behind him, he stepped in front of reporters to vow the city would appeal Judge Shira Scheindlin’s ruling, which basically accused the NYPD of being bigoted. Yet where was His Honor last week amid a string of setbacks in the case? The most dramatic setback was the scoop brought in by the New York Post, showing that in the month after Judge Scheindlin’s ruling, shootings in the city “spiked nearly 13 percent — and gun seizures plummeted more than 17 percent.” It was the first confirmation that New Yorkers have good reason to be so alarmed at the judge’s ruling. “Maybe it’s just a blip, maybe it’s a trend,” the Post quoted the mayor as saying Friday.

There’s also the speed with which Judge Scheindlin is rushing to build a bureaucracy with which to second-guess the police. Lawyers are being hired (the legal bill will, we predict, be millions). The Manhattan Institute’s Heather MacDonald reports in the Post that formation is under way of an advisory panel of the most left-wing law professors on any planet in this or the adjacent solar systems. This is a moment when one would think the mayor would have canceled his other plans and camped at the office of the corporation counsel to get things moving. After Judge Scheindlin ruled, the city waited two weeks to request a stay during appeal. It argued that “irreparable harm was imminent.”

Judge Scheindlin took her sweet time in replying, finally denying the motion August 27. As of this writing, the city still hasn’t filed for a stay at the Second Circuit, although the corporation counsel, Michael Cardozo, did announce on Tuesday that the Law Department would be moving there for a stay “in the next few days.” Maybe someone will wake the mayor when it happens, if not before. A stay, which would halt the implementation of Judge Scheindlin’s order during appeal, strikes us as close to the last chance to protect the ability of the police to protect New Yorkers from a situation that is already starting to unravel.

The city needs to be on its game here. The newspaper editor in us wonders why the city failed to file for a stay with the Second Circuit the next instant after a stay was denied by Judge Scheindlin. Wouldn’t an all-hands-on-deck appeals shop have had a well-honed request ready, just as a contingency? The city has already tried to have the appeal expedited, only to be slapped down by the Judge Wesley of the Second Circuit in an order without explanation and signed by a clerk. The plaintiffs in the case have already shown some of their hand; trying to block a stay in Judge Scheindlin’s court, they went so far as to sneer the NYPD was the same “department that reportedly” — our italics — “conducts surveillance on innocent Muslims.”

Is Mayor Bloomberg still there — or has he mentally moved on? It is possible to imagine that given his preference for Bermuda and the Hamptons and London, he’s eager to be out of a job that, by the third term, has been less than fully satisfying. It’s even conceivable that he could construe it as a kind of vindication if the city goes to Hell in a hand basket after he’s left City Hall. Conceivable, but we hope (and bet) not. His greatest achievement as mayor has been naming Commissioner Kelly to lead the NYPD and backing him and the department’s officers in bringing crime to record lows. If he loses this case, in which he’s a named defendant, it’s not just the men in blue whose reputations will be tainted.