My wife has been staying home to avoid catching the corona virus. That means she’s been watching cable news. And that in turn means she’s been watching the networks compete to see who can come up with the worst horror stories and the most depressing predictions.

The other day she decided she would go out for a walk someplace where she’d be safe from the virus, the Point Pleasant Beach boardwalk.

“You can’t,” I said. “They shut it down.”

“Why?” she asked.

Beats me. Other towns such as Spring Lake have also shut boardwalks popular with walkers and joggers.

But people need their daily exercise and there’s no place better than a spot where they’re safe from traffic.

Sure enough, when I drove over to Point Pleasant Beach I saw that many of the people who otherwise would have been on the boards were walking along the street, where they were in danger from another deadly menace: the SUV virus.

In this regard I believe our governor was making far more sense than the officials in those Shore towns. Perhaps it was because he remembers what happened to the last governor who shut it down, but Phil Murphy declared that Island Beach State Park was staying open. Not only that, he waived the $5 entry fee.

I decided I’d take a drive down there to see how that was working out. On the way I stopped in Seaside Heights. Local officials there were more practical. They kept the boardwalk open but shut the gates to the beach, which is not much of an attraction anyway due to the 45-degree water temperature.

Many beaches were closed because of the threat of coronavirus, but Gov. Phil Murphy was wise enough not to shut down Island Beach State Park. Perhaps he was thinking of what happened to Chris Christie after he shut the park in 2017. (Andrew Mills | NJ Advance Media)NJAM

That meant visitors could stroll the boards and even buy a slice from one of the pizzerias that remained open for takeout business.

Back in the car, I was passed by a biker with his girlfriend on back of his Harley and then by a guy driving a Porsche convertible with the top down. Unless they were on the way to some essential activity they seemed to be violating that lockdown order Murphy issued last week, with its call for people to leave their homes only for “essential services.” (Another order precludes “the issuance of mandates and restrictions by municipalities and counties at variance with the Governor’s order.” If the governor is keeping state beaches open, the closure of local beaches would certainly qualify as a mandate at variance with the order.)

But that order is on shaky legal grounds, said New Jersey’s most prominent legal analyst.

“How can the government decide what’s essential and what’s not?” Andrew Napolitano asked. “How can a dry-cleaner be essential while a Catholic Church is not essential?”

Dry-cleaners are indeed on the list of essential services while churches aren’t. That’s a clear violation of the constitutional right to worship as well as the right to travel, he said.

Even those orders shutting down restaurants are of dubious legal standing. If this drags on too long, we will see such challenges, the former Bergen County Superior Court judge predicted.

“Nobody has challenged anything,” he said. “Almost any judge would open a restaurant.”

Murphy wisely included a blanket exemption for outdoor exercise in his order. That exemption was being widely enjoyed by all the canoeists, kayakers and fishermen I saw when I got to the park.

But in Chicago, Mayor Lori Lightfoot has threatened to arrest people for exercising outdoors.

“She’s out of her mind,” Napolitano said. “They’re letting people out of jail for fear of contagion and she’s threatening to put them in jail if they’re jogging.”

Napolitano said New York Gov, Andrew Cuomo is doing a much better job of responding to the real risks. In a press conference last week, Cuomo said that the city’s strict quarantines might have backfired.

“I don’t even know that that was the best public health policy. Young people then quarantined with older people,” he said. “The younger people could have been exposing the older people to an infection.”

Napolitano, who leans very much to the libertarian side of any argument, said Cuomo put his finger on the problem with sweeping government edicts. He used the example of one of those games on the Seaside boardwalk.

“It’s like Whack-a-Mole,” he said. “You stop somebody from doing A and they start doing B.”

Exactly. You stop somebody from walking on the boardwalk and they go walk in traffic instead. That may make a politician feel good, but it just makes the situation more risky.

As we move into warmer weather, people all over the state will be looking for outdoor areas where they can get some fresh air. Murphy has wisely kept the other state parks open as well.

But if the governor is in the mood to issue executive orders, here’s one I’d suggest:

Order local officials to stop closing outdoor areas where people exercise.

And oh yeah, tell everyone to stop watching cable news.