New Jersey’s governor, James Mc-Greevey, should resign immediately. He should resign because he has corrupted democracy in an abuse of power involving patronage, not sex.

The gender of his lover is irrelevant. If he had placed an unqualified female lover in an $110,000 job advising on homeland security, in the anxious age of terrorism, it would be no different.

This sleazy politician, already drowning in a sea of corruption involving his fund-raisers, tried to save himself with a repugnant speech that attempted to cast himself as a martyr to gay liberation. This was public relations run amok – spin on steroids.

I was revolted watching Mr. Mc-Greevey’s Marine father and religious mother having to uncomfortably stand there, as family props in shock, while Mr. McGreevey blatantly tried to distort the nature of his scandal and manipulate the circumstances for sympathy.

It was pure political cynicism for the governor to delay the timing of his exit from office until November 15, so he could remain in power until after the deadline had passed for a special election, and through the presidential campaign.

His abuse of homeland security is so bad he ought to leave immediately. The politics of the moment should not matter, only the merits. Mr. McGreevey violated the trust of his voters – and apparently of two wives, his parents, and his children. He was a public man living a double life of lies.

After the damage-control press conference Mr. McGreevey’s spokeswoman babbled, “It’s unfortunate that they are playing politics with an intensely personal decision.”

This is public, not private. Mr. Mc-Greevey is the one playing politics. Golan Cipel was paid with public funds. He was given a public job he was unfit to perform. This jeopardized the safety of millions of people. Mr. Cipel was a public relations hack advising on counter-terrorism in a high threat time frame.

Mr. Cipel was a low-level press aide in the office of the Israeli consulate in Manhattan. He had no background or pedigree as a national security adviser. He was no anti-terrorism expert.

Some New Jersey Democrats seem to want Mr. McGreevey to cling to office to avert a special election. But this is undemocratic, and probably a tactical mistake. Let the voters vote. If Mr. Mc-Greevey is unfit to be governor on November 16, he is unfit today.

It would be better for the public if someone like Senator Corzine, or the state Senate president, Richard Codey, ran for governor now in a special election, than for Mr. McGreevey to hang on and taint New Jersey politics even more over the next three months.

My instincts tell me there are about six more layers to this McGreevey-Cipel scandal. It is a story with more legs than a centipede.

Why was money for Touro College part of the back-channel negotiations between the lawyers? Mr. Cipel had represented Touro in its efforts to establish a campus in New Jersey. Mr. Mc-Greevey’s indicted fund-raiser, Charles Kushner, was on the board of Touro. The disgraced former senator, Robert Torricelli, also stood to profit from a Touro deal.

Was Mr. Cipel trying to extort money? Was Mr. McGreevey trying to buy silences with hush money? Who came up with the $5 million number that was being negotiated as a payment to Mr. Cipel? Why hasn’t Mr. Cipel filed his threatened suit charging sexual harassment? It may take grand jury testimony, under oath, and penalty of perjury, to get truthful answers.

It is revealing that there is so much corruption swirling around the Mc-Greevey administration that his aides thought Mr. Cipel and his lawyer might be part of an FBI sting when the lawyers were nervously negotiating a payment right up until the moment Mr. McGreevey held his press conference.

If Mr. McGreevey wanted to put a lover on the state’s payroll – a ritual in Jersey politics for 100 years – why was he stupid enough to do it in homeland security? Anybody in Hudson County, or Trenton, could have advised him to give Mr. Cipel a low-profile job regulating bars, or racetracks, or beach erosion.

New Jersey is a great state. It has produced Bruce Springsteen, Supreme Court Justice William Brennan, President Woodrow Wilson, Count Basie, Sarah Vaughn, Frank Sinatra, and Philip Roth among others.

It has also spawned a sickening proportion of corrupt politicians – Abscam felons Harrison Williams and Frank Thompson; Newark’s former mayor, Hugh Addonizio; GOP leader Nelson Gross and most mayors of Jersey City, Camden, and Atlantic City.

New Jersey is better than James McGreevey. The governor ought to resign today, give voters a chance, and let the chips fall where they may. And he should spare us another bogus speech about gay pride. This is a patronage scandal about a public job and public money.