Wade Stewart is our favorite county commissioner. He’s conservative but pragmatic and always colorful. But Mr. Stewart cannot have his political cake and eat it too.

For years now, County Commissioners, with this newspaper’s backing, have said school leaders are free to spend local tax dollars as they see fit. In raw political speak, that means school leaders, not commissioners, are to blame if the schools eventually cut higher teacher pay from the tens of millions of dollars they receive annually from Johnston taxpayers.

This year, school leaders have made higher teacher pay a priority, and they have held other spending down, so much so that their total spending request is easily within the county’s means.

But now, suddenly, Mr. Stewart is giving the school board spending advice. Personally, he would rather see the school board buying buses instead of raising salary supplements for teachers, assistant principals and principals. And Mr. Stewart wonders if the schools are seeking enough dollars for their utility bills in the year ahead.

But until the school board made teacher pay a priority, Mr. Stewart and his fellow commissioners had never fretted about school buses and light bills. Which makes us wonder if commissioners have been playing politics with teacher pay all along.

Salary increases, in theory and practice, are a recurring expense, so maybe commissioners breathed a sigh of relief whenever the school board cut higher pay from its final spending plan. If so, commissioners were letting school leaders do their spending restraint for them while laying stagnant salary supplements at the feet of those same school leaders. That’s distasteful, even in politics.

It’s also unnecessary. The Board of Education raises salary supplements at its own political risk. True, County Commissioners might feel pressure to continue one year’s raises into the next, but they are under no legal obligation to do so. If the economy sputters, they can say, in good conscience, that the county cannot afford today what it could afford yesterday. It would then be up to school leaders to continue higher pay or cut other spending.

County Commissioners don’t have a dog in that fight — unless they suddenly decide they know best how to spend school dollars.