The speaker of the City Council, Gifford Miller, already losing credibility over council members’ franking privileges, suffered a blow to his authority in court on Friday. Justice Lewis Stone of the New York State Supreme Court ordered the speaker and other City Council leaders to print and distribute the newsletter of Council Member Allan Jennings, a Democrat of Queens.

The council refused to publish the newsletter because Mr. Jennings has failed to pay a $5,000 fine imposed on him by the council’s ethics committee for sex ual harassment. “We believe Councilman Jennings has to meet his responsibilities to the council and his obligations before we approve further requests,” a spokesman for Mr. Miller, Stephen Sigmund, told reporters.

But Mr. Jennings sued Mr. Miller, charging that the extra penalty was illegitimate and politically motivated. Mr. Miller, the lawsuit alleged, has “cloaked his naked political ambitions within the proto-fascist rubric of an unauthorized, dictatorial imposition of further discipline.”

The judge agreed that refusing to publish the newsletter exceeded the punishments authorized by the council at its disciplinary hearing. “This court will order them to treat him no differently [than other council members] because this was not part of his sanction,” Justice Stone said. Council leaders plan to file an appeal, according to Mr. Sigmund.

Mr. Miller’s lawyer, John Graham, began the hearing before Justice Stone by saying that the content of the newsletter was not at issue. Yet by the end of the proceedings, according to an Associated Press dispatch, he had told the judge that parts of the newsletter were unacceptably political and misleading.

Unacceptably political? What an odd accusation coming from Mr. Miller on the day after he finally admitted to spending $1.6 million of the council’s budget in order to stuff mailboxes across the city with self-promotional fliers and glossy pictures of himself.

Misleading? Several council members are now complaining that Mr. Miller’s mailings inappropriately featured campaign-style photos of Mr. Miller paired with their pictures and names. “There was an appearance that I had endorsed Speaker Miller for mayor when I had not,” one council member, Letitia James, told our Jill Gardiner over the weekend. “I felt betrayed.”

A council member from Brooklyn, Lewis Fidler, said he agreed to participate in a mailing as long as he could see the final proof before it went to press. “I never heard anything about it until it arrived in my mailbox at home,” Mr. Fidler said.

Why didn’t Mr. Miller get the council members’ approval before sending out the mailings? To create the impression that his mayoral bid had more support than it does. Mr. Fidler, for example, has endorsed one of Mr. Miller’s rivals in the Democratic primary, Fernando Ferrer. Ms. James strongly opposes the Atlantic Yards development project in her district, which Mr. Miller supports.

There’s no doubt that Mr. Miller’s mailings were misleading and unacceptably political, which is why council members and government watchdog groups have criticized him for abusing the franking process. Even worse, the massive printing job was divided into 150 smaller jobs to avoid the competitive bidding process that city procurement rules would require of a larger project. Those rules also say that work “shall not be artificially divided” to avoid that process.

Messrs. Miller and Sigmund spent last week defending the mailings as having an important public purpose: informing the public of their representatives’ agenda in the City Council. So why would Mr. Miller think that denying Mr. Jennings’s newsletter would be an appropriate punishment for him – and not a punishment of his constituents? Because he knows that the mailings are all about self-promotion, and all the voters get is the bill.