It shouldn’t be hard to guess who will win what’s now a two-way contest for an open seat on the Spokane County Civil Service Commission.

One hopeful, Yvonne Lopez-Morton, agrees with the Board of Spokane County Commissioners on the issue that led to the civil service vacancy. The other, Nancy Voorhees, disagrees. You figure the odds.

In the long run, though, knowing who the winner will be may be less important than knowing who the loser will be. And the loser may well be the civil service system itself, which is based on something that is being abused in this process – political independence.

Admittedly, a January decision by the Civil Service Commission was troubling. Sheriff Ozzie Knezovich’s firing of Deputy Joseph Mastel for exposing himself to an espresso stand barista was converted to a yearlong, unpaid suspension, followed by forced retirement. The decision allowed Mastel to cash in some of his unused sick leave.

Mastel’s despicable conduct called for firing, and Knezovich drew well-deserved accolades for his decisiveness. But the Civil Service Commission, which has existed for almost half a century to eliminate political favoritism in the Sheriff’s Office, ruled that outright dismissal was excessive.

The job of the civil service commissioners is to set emotion aside and review the law and the facts. In the end, they didn’t reinstate Mastel, they scaled back the severity of his punishment. He was off the payroll and out of a job, but it looked lenient to a disgusted public – a voting public that was in no mood for lenience.

County commissioners quickly seized on the fact that one of the civil service panel members, John R. Shagen, was coming to the end of his term; they declared he would not be reappointed. Commissioners Mark Richard and Bonnie Mager even asked a second civil service commissioner who joined in the decision, Curt Berklund, to resign. (The third civil service commissioner had recused himself from Mastel’s appeal.)

It is situations like this that make prospective judges squirm when they go through confirmation proceedings. Political popularity should never trump administration of the law and regulations that citizens expect to be applied impartially – even if the outcome is maddening and unpopular.

Sometimes such a process points to laws that need to be changed instead of ignored. Sometimes such cases spare taxpayers costly lawsuits. For those and other reasons, the appointment of a civil service commissioner should never depend on how the appointee would rule in a specific case.

Not only did the county commissioners make every effort to remodel the civil service makeup over a decision they disliked, they incorporated it into their selection process for a replacement. In interviews on Monday, both Lopez-Morton and Voorhees were asked if they agreed with the January decision.

Citizens should be able to expect that civil service decisions, like court decisions, are not merely extensions of politicians’ preferences. That protection needs to be honored.