Talk is cheap.

That’s why we urge Waterford residents not to sign a petition being circulated by about 15 residents – as best as anybody can discern – calling for the recall of Waterford Selectman Whizzer Wheeler.

In a town of more than 1,400, 15 is hardly an uprising.

Angered by Wheeler’s rough rhetoric and unabashed resistance to political correctness, this fractious group, most with personal axes to grind, is planning to launch its recall campaign today during the town’s Fourth of July celebration.

It’s sad this group will try to steal the limelight on this national day of pride, but will also color a small town’s summer celebration to advance their personal agendas.

Sadder still is this group’s desire to remove one leader from office without any idea of who would replace Wheeler. None of the petitioners, to our knowledge, have stepped forward for the job.

So far, the proudest vision this group of would-be revolutionaries can imagine entails tossing tea bags to children during the Fourth of July parade in vague reference to the Boston Tea Party.

This idea is misguided and misplaced.

Misplaced because the Tea Party, one in a series of protests against the British crown’s insistence on taxing colonists without allowing the colonists fair representation in Parliament, took place in December not July.

Misguided because the Tea Party was an uprising against a tax imposed by a king and parliament an ocean’s distance away.

This group is angry with Wheeler, upset things didn’t quite go their way at Waterford’s annual town meeting last March. There, for the first time in more than 150 years, voters agreed to every article on the town meeting warrant, including ones reorganizing the town’s property assessment and taxing system.

“He seems to be thinking about doing what he wants rather than what the people want,” one of the group’s organizers, Marcia Hersey, told the Sun Journal. “He’s forgotten he’s working for us.”

Really?

We find Hersey’s assertion equally misplaced and misguided as her group’s proposed actions and vision of a tea party in July.

Opposed to the patriots who dumped 45 tons of British tea into Boston Harbor in December in defiance of a tyranny imposed from abroad, Waterford’s band of would-be revolutionaries will pass tea bags in protest of government actions imposed by the voters of Waterford themselves.

It seems Hersey and her group would have town ordinances crafted to suit their tiny minority instead of the town as a whole.

Indeed, Wheeler, despite what some might consider his social flaws, is working for the majority of people in Waterford – those who elected him and those who stood with him at town meeting.

Waterford voters would be well-advised to steer clear of a small band of petitioners who would have it the other way around.