The Chargers and San Diego have reached an impasse. Not regarding their negotiating positions on a new stadium, but regarding whether they should even continue to negotiate.

“We’ve been working to keep the Chargers in SD while they have been working to move to LA,” Mayor Kevin Faulconer said Wednesday on (where else?) Twitter. “We can get this done if we have a willing partner.”

But the Chargers aren’t willing to partner up on a proposal that is doomed from the get go.

“The Chargers will never be part of the City’s legally dubious effort to deal with the California Environmental Water Quality Act,” Chargers counsel Mark Fabiani said, via Jason Cole. “City officials are of course free to drive themselves off the cliff into legal oblivion with a half-baked Environmental Impact Report, but the team has no intention of hitching itself to the City’s misguided, doomed scheme.”

As noted Wednesday, San Diego has proposed an aggressive timeline for complying with environmental laws and also getting a public vote scheduled before the Chargers must decide whether to leave or to stay.

A separate statement from Faulconer’s spokesman makes it clear that the city now believes that the Chargers will leave.

“For the first time in seven months of incredibly hard work from the City, County, and CSAG, the Chargers did something honest — walk away from the table,” Jason Roe said, via Cole. “The truth is, they were never at the table. They’ve misled the fans and our elected and civic leaders by saying they wanted to remain in San Diego when in fact they initiated the process of relocation to L.A. a year ago. And throughout this process they’ve not done one single tangible thing toward a solution but instead put up phony roadblocks to success. Chargers fans deserve better.”

And there it is: The local political cover necessary to blame the Chargers for choosing to leave after the City dilly-dallied for nearly a generation to address the stadium problem. The Chargers aren’t choosing to leave; they’re choosing not to further delay the process of leaving in deference to stadium-financing efforts they believe ultimately won’t succeed.

But it’s still not over. Via U-T San Diego, the City plans to make a direct plea to the NFL, in the hopes of forcing the Chargers back to the bargaining table.

“We intend to discuss our financial framework and timeline with the NFL in the coming days and weeks so they can hear directly San Diego’s ability to approve a stadium plan in a timely manner,” Faulconer said.

The NFL may hear it, but there’s no reason to think the NFL will believe it. And there’s no reason to think the NFL ultimately will force the Chargers to sign on to an idea that the Chargers subjectively believe will fail — especially if it means potentially boxing the Chargers into the bottom corner of California with an unresolved stadium situation and one or two teams encroaching on turf the Chargers had absorbed over the last two decades.