Jefferson County loves a little weirdness and good-humored parody.

If you and your club members want to wear masks, murmur over secret handshakes and carve coded mottos on your treehouse, go for it. Call yourself Minister of Justice of the Rongovian Embassy for all we care.

But when you spread oil on the sidewalk and pour sand in the gears? Then it’s time for grown-ups to step in.

Regarding Joe D’Amico’s “Jefferson County Washington” Facebook spoof, the constitutionally elected government of Jefferson County has for too long taken the course of indulgent appeasement instead of stiffening its spine to deliver a little tough love.

With the official county Facebook page finally operating, it’s time to make clear there is just one Jefferson County government, and shut down D’Amico’s taunt that he’s in charge in these parts.

He’s not elected. He’s accountable to nobody, yet he opened the “Jefferson County Washington” Facebook page in 2012and made it look like any other county government page.

It was perfectly legal and was a funny prank...for about a day.

It got a lot less funny when the Jefferson County Commission hid behind the County Administrator, who in 2017 was sent out to murmur about D’Amico’s free speech rights. What about the concerns of the other 31,000 residents of this county?

What D’Amico is doing now amounts to a kind of “domain squatting,” the bad faith act of buying, registering and using internet addresses that take advantage of someone else’s trademark or name for your own purposes.

If a slip along the Cascadia Subduction Zone triggers the big quake emergency experts fret about, confusion between the real Jefferson County and the fake one is the last thing the other 31,000 of us need.

Residents seeking information about where to evacuate will want the right stuff and within seconds.

What they don’t need is to spend minutes scrolling through a fake Facebook page only to learn it’s someone trolling the county government. Ho. Ho.

Stand up, Jefferson County.

To your credit, when D’Amico sued in 2009 over an open records infraction, and won, you correctly internalized the ruling: he has property rights and first and second amendment rights. Even if the groupthink hereabouts dislikes his brand of survivalist entrepreneurship, he gets equal treatment under the law.

But Jefferson County has overreacted: The way to counter the blizzard of lawsuits and bluster from D’Amico’s Ministers of Justice isn’t to slam the county commission doors, take every conversation off the record and cave in to his demand for in-private “mediation” every time he issues a new communique about zoning rules.

No. The correct lesson is to carefully and respectfully work in plain view, protecting his rights no more or less carefully than those of the other 31,000 of us.

This has the added benefit of putting him and his ambassadors on the record. Will he accept neighborly restrictions on shooting hours and bullet-catching back-stops? Does the U.S. military, owner of 11.4 million acres, need to train there? Why might that be? How about septic? Is he a hepatitis denier or will he treat the waters upstream of his neighbors?

To be sure, there are risks to governing in the open with a serial litigator, but Jefferson County’s closeted diplomacy with the shadow county has not yielded much in the way of results for the many.

Step out from behind that locked county commission door and onto the bully pulpit.

Take the sophomoric senior staff at Facebook to task for lacking the simple good judgment to prevent D’Amico’s protracted interference with emergency communication. For heaven’s sake, they “verified” a page that was built to troll county government.

If D’Amico has the contracts he claims to have with the U.S. Government and high-end retailers, appeal directly to them to end this interference in the normal operations of the constitutional government of Jefferson County.

It’s time for the real Jefferson County to stand up.

And it’s time for D’Amico’s Ministry of Information to stand down, renaming its Facebook page something less deceptive, like “Jefferson County Rally Point.”

Keeping “Jefferson County Washington” open looks less prankish and more like the early chapters of a doomsday fantasy in which the system slowly crafted by geniuses like Madison, Jefferson and Franklin will in a moment of crisis be replaced by a shadow government slapped together by “Blake Matson” and “Joe Tantori,” the heroes of the prepper guidebooks cranked out by D’Amico’s Attorney-General-in-Waiting.

-Dean Miller

(The Leader’s Editorials are the opinion of the Editorial Board: Publisher Lloyd Mullen; co-owner Louis Mullen; Editor Dean Miller and Leader readers who lobby The Leader. Each editorial is signed by the person who writes that editorial on behalf of the Editorial Board.)