Anyone can be impressive when the odds are in their favor. But we learn the most about people at the messy endings of things: divorces, deaths and defeats.

Here’s what we learned when Washington Governor Jay Inslee’s presidential bid used up the $5.3 million he raised: He made sure his campaign consultants got paid, his airfare, meals and hotels were paid for, but the state of which he is a steward was not a priority of his campaign budget.

Washington State Patrol estimates Inslee’s campaigning cost more than $660,000 extra in March through July of this year, as his security detail ran up overtime, un-budgeted-for travel and other expenses.

By law, troopers must protect the governor at all times.

But Inslee built a schedule that had nothing to do with governing Washington State and everything to do with Potomac Fever. He was auditioning for president or maybe hoping he’ll get the nod for secretary of energy or interior if a Democrat unseats President Donald Trump.

What a wonderful Labor Day surprise it would have been if the state of Washington’s governor or its leading political party had pledged to repay state dollars spent to protect Inslee during his hunt for a new job.

What a jolt to working folks if political bigshots said one true thing about this situation: that in any other profession, it borders on theft to charge your employer for expenses of your job hunt.

But party leaders and those who fawn around elected power couldn’t manage to say what any babysitter worth her salt says to greedy little savages with their hands in the cookie jar: “Just because you can, doesn’t mean you should.”

Woodenly repeating “We’re going to follow Washington law and Washington law is that the Washington State Patrol provides security for the governor,’’ as Inslee has been doing, might work in a deposition transcript. But in real life, it leaves Democrats twisting in the wind, expected to defend the distasteful because the Big Guy will not back down and has found his loophole.

Haven’t we had enough of that in all political parties?

If it had chastised Inslee, the onetime party of the working class would also have dumped a needed wheelbarrow of garlic on the casket of Clintonian Legalism as an acceptable style.

The fact that Republicans are making this an issue means certain robotic partisans automatically leap to Inslee’s defense. Can’t any Democrat muster the courage to throw some shade?

This wasteful security detail spending is only Washington law because pols of both parties refuse to legislate it out of existence. Instead, they fulminate and fuss, but lust for the day when they have the kind of incumbency that is an insurmountable advantage.

The disappearance of a principled backbone is exactly how the GOP has lost its way. Can’t at least one political party keep an eye out for the working woman who has to pay her taxes BEFORE all other bills? Can’t at least one party think about the kid working hoot owl whose gas taxes are collected the moment he starts to pump gas into his truck?

Putting Washington taxpayers first would have meant fewer weeks on the vanity tour for Inslee. It would have meant cutting off some of his campaign’s $840,000 in payments to the surveillance-industrial complex in Mountain View, CA that politicians pay lavishly for intelligence files about us. And it would have meant sending out less of the massive social media and junk mail appeals campaigns run on.

It would have required Inslee, and the Washington House and the Senate to legislate new rules, rooted in admirable clarity.

Sadly, the law still stands, though it is entirely in Inslee’s power to make sensible reform.

-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.