He’s done a runner, vanished into the fumes of his own booze and drug addictions.

Which may be the greatest kindness Rob Ford could ever bestow on this mayor-battered metropolis: Taking leave of it.

Run Rob run. Or slink away, if you must, as you apparently have.

Run for your life because forgiveness, if not absolution, lies in that direction: Admission, treatment, perhaps rehabilitation; a second chance to be a father your children can love, as you have revealed in yet another drunken stupor that yours do not. A terribly sad confession, if true, if not merely the bathetic ramblings of a lush.

But do not run for office. That way lies madness, pressures you are clearly incapable of bearing, the siren song of alcohol and crack a ruinous temptation, the dirge of your existence.

That’s your problem, though, and it’s done time being ours.

Stand up as a man and stand down as a politician, not just in the interim, not merely while you address your manifold issues at some undisclosed detox facility, but with finality. Put a full-stop period on it, rather than a dot-dot-dot, to-be-continued-later disclaimer.

There’s nothing here left for you except, maybe, the pity vote and a further round of shaming, if you’re even capable of genuine embarrassment and contrition, if you’re capable of feeling — and feeding — anything beyond your immediate reflexive impulses, your insatiable ego.

The hardcore anvil-heads of Ford Nation — dead-enders, zealots, acolytes and apostles — might urge otherwise, as you claim, but they have their own interests at heart, not yours.

Like those closest to you — a mother, a brother, a ravaged sister who should know better because she’s been in this same dreadful place, a wastrel addict — the devotees have disastrously hindered rather than helped. They would not recognize the gravity of your frailties, excused them. Worse, celebrated them as if your compulsions should be boxed off, detached from the rest of who you are. Any rational person would have recognized that, at this point in your life, this is essentially what you are. The booze, the drugs, the foolishness, the deplorable judgment, the risk-taking, all those dregs of an evening spent on barstools, vomiting in restrooms, incoherent and belligerent — they are the essence of Rob Ford. That is Rob Ford distilled.

Rob, vulgarian: That’s you.

Rob, crack-sucking: That’s you.

Rob, the liar, endlessly in denial, a family trait: That’s you.

Rob, in booze-fueled blather: That’s you.

Rob, in towering rages: That’s you.

Rob, in self-consuming flame-out: That’s you.

Rob, seized by rage, whaling on the best non-blood friend you’ve ever had — a felon and a vile man, true, but still — according to the lengthy account of this episode from last weekend as recounted Thursday to the Star’s Kevin Donovan by someone who purports to have been there for the beat-down, Sandro Lisi bawling and raising his arms to protect his face.

Your bromance partner, the man who hasn’t turned the screws on you, not yet, to save his own skin. But then there are more than a few people who seem addicted to you, enthralled in a way the rest of us can’t comprehend.

You defy explanation.

And this is us: ground down, exhausted, too weary of the entire prolonged tragicomedy to even say — told you so.

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The mayor — now without all powers, even the window-dressing handful which remained after council acted to contain the damage last November — can no longer dance the lies fandango of his limited confessions, the narrow divulgences, the one-size-fits-all sorry. With Wednesday’s revelations of apparent crack redux — Donovan, who was there at the dawn of the story a year ago, has now seen the three pieces of footage that are being shopped around by yet another opportunistic entrepreneur — and the simultaneous disclosure in the Sun of yet another disgusting tirade captured on audiotape — Ford stands before the world utterly exposed, utterly naked, utterly bankrupt.

He is an evident misogynist, racist, homophobe.

He is sometimes violent.

None of this should come as a surprise. Much of the same has been amply documented.

Ford thought he could get away with it, almost proven correct too, because the cops didn’t pounce when they could have, because Ford Nation didn’t abandon him, not in overwhelming numbers, when given every justification for doing so.

And now he appeals for mercy, after never once showing a grain of grace towards his countless perceived enemies, whether the chief of police or his colleagues on council or his Judas transit chair — as Rob and brother Doug characterized Karen Stintz, the mayor race rival Ford so vilely insults on the aforementioned audio tape, captured surreptitiously for posterity. Stintz might be a long shot to succeed Ford in the mayor’s chair, but nobody is sitting prettier at the moment, provided the moral means to bring him down single-handedly, if formal and forever expulsion from city politics is what she seeks.

His mother’s tears, Doug’s tears — too late and too self-serving. Rob Ford is an extension of them as well, defenders and diverters in a colossally dysfunctional family. They’ve just about loved Rob to death, which is what he purportedly now fears most, why he’s allegedly capitulated, thrown in the towel, the pipe.

Know what? I don’t believe a word of it.

This is Ford buying time, always best, always most cunning, when at his execrable worst — not the oaf so many of his critics assume but an instinctive, populist pol right down to the roots of his brush-cut, the Marine buzz he suddenly showed up sporting when that first crack video was reported last May. Why? Probably because somebody told him traces of drug use could be found in a follicle.

So, nope, don’t believe it, not any of the contrition and mortification and repentance. Nobody should buy this poor-me codswallop.

In the Ballad of Rob Ford, this sounds like just one more false note strummed.

And if you’re buying it, then you’re a strung-out Ford junkie too.