Talk about protesting too much:

The mayor’s son has been 8defamed and exploited! An honorable and decent father is being pilloried for no good reason!

Calm down, everybody. Isn’t this why the city of Spokane formed an Ethics Committee is the first place? So we could get impartial determinations on the gray areas of public service? Sure it is. Now let’s see how it works.

To recap, The Spokesman-Review reported on Wednesday that Patrick Hession, the mayor’s 25-year-old son, had been hired by American Emergency Response, which is the ambulance service that admitted to overbilling residents $320,689 between January 2003 and March 2006. It is also the subject of a class-action lawsuit for alleged overbilling that stretches back a decade.

It was Dennis Hession who determined what financial penalty AMR would face. He could’ve fined the company hundreds of thousands of dollars. He chose $80,172.

Unfortunately, the mayor, now engaged in an election campaign, has chosen not to address the hiring of his son. A call to an administrative aide was referred to his campaign manager, Steve McNutt, who said, “It is a campaign issue, not a city administration issue.”

McNutt said Hession mentioned the hiring to him about a month ago, noting that Hession was concerned about the political consequences.

“I think this is a political low blow,” McNutt told The Spokesman-Review.

It certainly could be a campaign issue, but, more important, it is definitely a city administrative matter. Because his son now works for AMR, the mayor will have to recuse himself from all related matters, including the selection of ambulance service when AMR’s contract comes up for renewal next year.

Is any or all of this unethical? We simply do not have enough information to say. But the city does have a way to get at those answers.

An investigation by the Ethics Committee could get at issues that have yet to be addressed: When exactly was Patrick Hession hired? When was the mayor notified? Who did the hiring? Thus far, AMR won’t say. Why not? Did the mayor have dealings with AMR during or after the hiring? Was the hiring process in accordance with the city’s ethics policy?

Those are not difficult or unreasonable questions. Had the mayor simply made an announcement when he found out and called for an inquiry, those questions might have been answered by now.

That such questions might be politically inconvenient during the stretch run of a campaign is immaterial. The mayor has only himself to blame for the timing.

This isn’t to say the mayor did anything wrong, but instead of batting down nonexistent charges or starting a character-witness campaign, it would be better to put this into the hands of an independent body that is impervious to the slings and arrows of campaign politics.