It may be only $4,500, but the city’s expenditure on fake fog for downtown Manhattan can go down in the annals of government waste alongside the $400 Defense Department hammer. At least in those incidents there was something concrete purchased with the money: The Pentagon had a new hammer, whose hefty price tag, actually, was only an accounting fiction to begin with — the Pentagon really paid about $15. Here, however, New York City has paid, really and truly, $4,500 for mist, along with a few plastic puddles, as part of an art installation.

And this speck of mist could just as well get lost in the downpour of $25 million that has been showered upon the city’s lemurs. That’s right — lemurs. In a time when New York City ought to be pinching every penny it has, the taxpayers are about to foot the bill to build a new $25 million home for ring-tailed lemurs, crocodiles, and birds of Madagascar at the Bronx Zoo. The City Council, Mayor Bloomberg, and now the Landmarks Preservation Commission have approved the project to renovate the zoo’s Lion House, which has been in disuse since 1986.

“It’s like the quintessential low-priority capital project,” the Manhattan Institute’s fiscal policy expert, E.J. McMahon, told The New York Sun recently. We couldn’t agree more. “In the present fiscal situation, it clearly should be way down on the list of priorities,” he said. New Yorkers had plenty of ideas of what might be a higher priority, even if we wouldn’t necessarily agree with each and every one. A spokesman for the Department of Transportation said that at a cost of $20 to fill one pothole, the city could fill 1.25 million of them. An activist said that the city could buy 250 apartments with services for the homeless with the money. For what the city is paying for fog, we might add, it could be giving at least one family the chance to send their child to private or parochial school.

The monkey money could also be used for school improvements. It would probably be enough to fix up Manhattan’s Luperon high school, which Manhattan’s president, C. Virginia Fields, said last week has staircases too narrow to fit more than a single person. The school has classrooms with no windows. It has no gym and no auditorium.

City officials point out that not spending the money on the monkeys wouldn’t free it up to spend on operating expenses. And that the fog funds were given away a couple of years ago. Well, that’s besides the point. The point is that almost any project we can think of would be a higher priority than the ones on which the city has chosen to spend the taxpayers’ money. If New Yorkers wanted to see monkey business, they’d just come over to City Hall. Instead, these types of stories leave them in a fog.