Disturbingly, some Nassau-decision makers are privately suggesting that bringing in a strong state fiscal control board to make critical financial choices is a politically desirable strategy.

It would be the grossest and most cynical negligence for legislators to purposely hand life and death decisions over to an outside entity in order to avoid looking bad. They'll look plenty bad if this is the game plan.

We got into this mess because some politicians would do almost anything rather than vote for a reasonable revenue increase. As if paying deficits paid back through borrowing and bonding isn't just a back door tax increase.

Some thought it would be easy to search and destroy mounds of budget blubber. It hasn't been so easy.

County fat doesn't jump out like at you like on a bad lamb chop. Instead, government and the GOP machine have marbled together over the past 30 years, and it's hard to sort out. Most county spending is actually mandated by the state and federal governments, and the easiest targets have been contracts to external social service providers. Those hurting the most have been in the cross hairs.

Nassau has a centralized county government that runs many activities ¬ such as assessments, fire inspection, some courts ¬ which are run by individual towns elsewhere. Some departments can be reinvented from the ground up for great savings, but that takes time, and we're on a one month Wall Street deadline.

In large part, Nassau doesn't have a spending crisis, it has a revenue shortfall crisis. It will take a combination of solutions to truly stabilize finances, including decreasing some spending and increasing some revenue. They've just got to raise some taxes. And by far less than taxes went up in Suffolk during their 1988 fiscal problem.

And the longer they wait, the harder it's going to be to recover from whatever fallout there may be. Glen Cove Mayor Tom Suozzi made tough tax decisions upon taking office in 1994 and survived. Conversely, when Troy had its crisis in the mid-'90s, Republicans swept out Democrats and were themselves swept out when they only made cosmetic changes and handed things over to a control board.

Political leaders win trust and long-term support through clear, consistent messages. The unfortunate nature of this particular situation practically requires some mad scrambling. But a mad scramble followed by the loss of local control over the lives of our residents would turn a crisis into a multi-level disaster.

And may it be a political disaster for any official who punts at this critical moment.