Supporters of Attorney General Spitzer’s campaign for governor are lighting on a novel new tactic – they’re taking his opponent to court. Members of the executive board of the Nassau County Police Benevolent Association have filed a lawsuit against the county executive, Thomas Suozzi, charging that he abused his office to retaliate against them for opposing his latest reelection bid. But considering that Mr. Suozzi is running against Mr. Spitzer for the Democratic nomination, and considering that the PBA and its lawyers in this case happen to have donated a total of $18,600 to Mr. Spitzer’s various campaigns over the years and that the lawyers themselves have worked for Mr. Spitzer in various official or volunteer capacities in the past, New Yorkers might well start to wonder whether something else is going on.

The PBA’s gripe with Mr. Suozzi traces back to his early days as county executive in 2002. Taking the helm of a county in dire fiscal straits, Mr. Suozzi started tight ening belts throughout county government, including the police department. The PBA, as the union representing police officers, objected to Mr. Suozzi’s reckoning of how many officers the county needed and how much they should be paid. Although the union had endorsed him, the relationship deteriorated rapidly, and the parties eventually had to go to arbitration to agree on a contract.

Among other issues the arbitrators settled was the matter of pay for union executives. Because their duties prevent them from working overtime or moonlighting – common ways for ordinary officers to augment their incomes – members of the union’s executive board requested pay supplements to compensate for lost overtime and off-duty employment, supplements that had cost a total of $400,000 by the time election day rolled around in 2005.

In other words, already overtaxed Nassau County residents were being asked to pay six police officers for their sparetime political activism. The PBA officials won those supplements in arbitration, and promptly set about trying to unseat Mr. Suozzi in his 2005 re-election bid. They spent $500,000 in a failed effort; Mr. Suozzi won 59% of the vote, trouncing his opponent by a 20-point margin. After that victory, Mr. Suozzi tried to block the supplement payments to union leaders, the action that prompted this week’s lawsuit.

Those leaders claim Mr. Suozzi violated their First Amendment rights to free speech by using the power of the purse to retaliate against them, but by our lights Mr. Suozzi was in the right. The PBA has a right to political speech, but it doesn’t have the right to demand that taxpayers pay for it. Those taxpayers overwhelmingly endorsed Mr. Suozzi’s agenda, implicitly rejecting the PBA’s, in November. So it makes sense for Mr. Suozzi to wonder whether subsidizing more union activism was the best use of taxpayer money.

Such finer points risk being obscured by what looks and smells a lot like a blatantly political court action. Mark as Exhibit A the $18,600 in donations from the plaintiffs and their attorneys to Mr. Spitzer’s 2002 and 2006 campaigns, including $6,000 from the union to Mr. Spitzer’s gubernatorial war chest, $5,000 of it this year. Exhibit B: One of the PBA’s lawyers, Richard Emery, sits on the New York State Commission on Judicial Conduct, a post to which he was appointed by Mr. Spitzer’s running mate, the minority leader of the Senate, David Paterson. Exhibit C: Another PBA lawyer, Andrew G. Celli Jr., was appointed to a lobbying commission by Mr. Paterson, used to head the Civil Rights Bureau in Mr. Spitzer’s office, and sits on the board of Children for Children, a charity founded and chaired by Mr. Spitzer’s wife.

The union denies that this suit is motivated by opposition to Mr. Suozzi’s gubernatorial aspirations. As to their choice of attorneys, the president of the PBA, Gary Dela Raba, told the Sun yesterday that the identity of the lawyers has no bearing on the justness of the cause, that the union chose its lawyers and did not know at the time that they were supporters of Mr. Spitzer, and that the PBA’s choice was driven by its desire to work with a firm that had extensive experience in this type of law.

A spokesman for the Spitzer campaign, Ryan Toohey, noted that the dispute between Mr. Suozzi and the PBA stretches back years and called any suggestion that Mr. Spitzer was involved in the suit “absolutely laughable.” That depends, we suppose, on one’s sense of humor. It’s bad enough that Mr. Spitzer’s supporters are, in this case, lining up against the interests of taxpayers. It’s even worse that they’re doing that lining up in a lawsuit against Mr. Spitzer’s opponent. If Mr. Suozzi ever ends up in the governor’s office, he’ll have a chance to attempt some of the same thrift on behalf of the taxpayers that he did in dealing with the PBA.