We’ve all seen the darker side of Gov. Paul LePage, so we need not recite each of the inane and offensive remarks he has made over the past three years.

It’s like the governor has an inner third-grader, a tirade-throwing little boy he cannot contain. When it takes over, usually when he is angry, he says and does stupid things.

That’s what happened again Wednesday when Maine’s attorney general bluntly and unequivocally told the governor that he is breaking the law by not releasing a consultant’s report on Maine’s welfare system.

The governor’s response: “Tell her to sue me.”

Are we to think our governor chooses the laws he intends to obey? Would he intentionally violate a law even if a court ordered him to obey it?

Maybe this is what three years in office does to a man who jokes about taking Halloween candy from smaller children in Lewiston’s Little Canada neighborhood when he was a youth.

In effect, he does what he wants because he is who he is — the biggest bully on the block.

That the governor was breaking Maine’s Freedom of Access law has been obvious from the start, and an ordinary person wouldn’t need a lawyer to know it.

The law is clear as a bell on a frosty Maine morning — a document paid for and received by state government belongs to the people of Maine. Not to Paul LePage.

Even the contract for the research and report says that under state law it must be made available to the public.

It doesn’t say, “When Paul LePage says so.” 

His office explains that the report is complex. But the law makes no exception for “complex” reports.

The state probably receives and distributes hundreds of reports a year that are difficult to understand. That doesn’t stop the state from making them available.

Is there something wrong with this version of the report by welfare consultant Gary Alexander, something the governor doesn’t like?

Maybe the Alexander Group didn’t find exactly what the governor wanted it to find. We know the governor has his own angry bundle of preconceptions about poverty in Maine.

Maybe the report found something different, something the people of Maine deserve to know.

Maybe the report points to incompetence in LePage’s supervision of the Department of Health and Human Services. Lord knows there has been plenty of that, including an audit finding the agency destroyed public documents after the Sun Journal requested them in 2012.

That the governor has held this report for 24 days shows he believes the report won’t do enough to help his election campaign.

Are the governor and his staff now doctoring up the Alexander report to suit their purposes? To better help his campaign?

Will there be multiple copies of this report? Will the governor’s office destroy the first version and twist the report its own way?

Our previous dealings with LePage’s DHHS show a belief that political ends justify the means.

A rational chief executive, such as a governor, would take a look at good legal advice and do one of two things: Explain why he believes the law is on his side or, more likely, recognize and respect the law by releasing the report.

We are in new territory with this governor. We are beyond slips of the lip and offensive comments.

We have a governor willing to break laws to suit his own political purposes.

That is not only dangerous, but it sends a message to the rest of state government that it is OK to twist, bend and even break the law for political purposes.

In environmental matters. Health matters. Financial matters. Labor matters. Regulatory enforcement.

Just do it. The boss doesn’t care.

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The opinions expressed in this column reflect the views of the ownership and the editorial board.