Yesterday an evening mayoral debate was postponed “out of respect for Mayor Ford.” After we learned the specifics of the mayor’s situation — a large, rare, malignant tumor in the mayor’s abdomen that needs immediate chemotherapy treatment — the decision seemed all the more appropriate. Ford faces a confrontation with a grave threat and compassion should transcend politics.

So allow me to show Rob Ford a measure of respect by not hiding behind false piety and sincere-but-useless hopes for his recovery. Whatever else you can accuse Rob Ford of — and I have accused him of a lot — he has never been a man to sugar coat things. He based his campaign on “Respect for Taxpayers” and has often prided himself on his willingness to “call a spade a spade.” In return, I’ve always paid him the courtesy of being bluntly honest. I will not diminish him now by suddenly adopting a hushed tone and sticking with best wishes.

Here’s the truth: the Ford brothers claim they are continuing to run because they love the city. But in doing so, they are placing their own family’s needs ahead of the needs of the city.

Right now, their genuinely tragic personal story cannot transcend politics because Rob Ford and his family will not allow it to. Rob Ford is offering himself as a city council candidate, and his brother Doug proposes to carry on his work running for mayor. As long as they are running, they are the top political story in Toronto, because the Ford family’s rule and misrule of city hall has become, for a majority of voters, the top political issue in the city. In many ways, he personally defines the election. Still.

For an entire week, that election has been waiting on news from the Ford family, as they asked for sympathetic privacy even as they played musical ballots. Mayoral debates have been put off. The other leading candidates for mayor softened critiques and withheld platform planks, so as not to be disrespectful (and not to be overshadowed by news from the hospital). Yesterday, newsrooms around the city held their breaths waiting to see what this story — the story — would be.

If you’re inclined, as some people are, to love Rob Ford purely for his political survival skills, there is something admirable about this: he will never surrender. Even if you aren’t so inclined, his continued dominance of Toronto’s news and politics inspires a kind of awe.

But it is only if you look at this story as a personal drama about Rob Ford and his family that it is possible to respect a decision to carry on politically. Because for most of us, this is something larger — it’s a citywide political drama about the future that affects everyone. The subjugation of the city’s needs to Ford’s personal life is traumatizing.

That’s been the story for the past four years, in ever more maddening and finally saddening ways. His appeal to his supporters has always been intensely personal. As personal as his problems that hijacked all city business: his alienation of council, his ethics breaches and football coaching misadventures, his addiction problems and the police investigation stemming from them.

Rob Ford has been a disastrously bad mayor, not just because of his personal shortcomings, but because of how he refused to allow any distinction between personal and political issues.

And so on to the end. Or whatever this is. The struggle to avoid the end.

We face the possibility, given what Dr. Zane Cohen told us about what to expect of treatment over the next 42 or more days, of Rob Ford hobbled by chemotherapy but still knocking on doors and making speeches, while his brother runs for mayor on his legacy. That’s likely to be a campaign fought by opponents tiptoeing around serious policy and governance issues in deference to the very real sympathy we feel for the Ford family and what they are going through.

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No one wants to be critical of a patient undergoing chemotherapy, nor offer harsh scrutiny of the brother rallying to his side. Yet criticism and scrutiny are in order for an election campaign like this one. The policies that the mayor has pursued over the past four years, and the divisive tone he and his brother have brought to city hall, are key issues in a debate the city needs settled.

The bind: given their personal situation, this is the wrong time to be harshly critical of how the Ford brothers have governed. But given that they’re candidates for tag-team re-election, this is the time when such harsh criticism of their record is needed. A debate governed by polite platitudes borne of pity is not going to heal the divisions in this city.

The Ford family should be able to focus all its energy on its own crisis. The city’s political debate should focus on other issues. The Fords did not invite or cause this personal crisis, but they can put a stop to the political one. Only the Fords have the power to separate the personal and political here, by bravely stepping away for the rest of this election to tend to personal issues. If they did that, I suspect they’d inspire a rare political consensus in this city: Toronto would be virtually unanimous in respecting their political sacrifice, and wishing them well in their personal struggle.

Edward Keenan writes on city issues.