It’s the stupid, stupid.

Not the crack, not the boozing, not the consorting with gang bangers, not the lies-without-end, not the vulgarities and not the shamelessness — at least, none of that in isolation.

Premier Kathleen Wynne has valid reason to pretend that Rob Ford doesn’t exist as mayor of Toronto — because he’s mayor in name only. City council saw to that late last year by removing most of Ford’s traditional powers, along with much of his staff, transferring them to Deputy Mayor Norm Kelly.

But she could just as rightly bypass Ford for his chronic doltishness, and only the mayor’s busking fart-catchers at the Toronto Sun would find basis for complaint.

Ford has been stalking the premier via his usual sycophants — and, on Thursday, from his silly bully pulpit on a U.S. sports radio show — because, boohoo, Wynne won’t give him one-to-one face time so that the quasi-mayor of Toronto can make his pitch for the province to pay the city’s storm and flood costs.

You remember the ice storm, right? To Ford’s apologists and cheerleaders, the fact our ersatz mayor stood at a podium day after day and recited statistics handed to him should be the stuff of political rehabilitation. And he did it appropriately sober-faced, without a teleprompter!

Weighed against the endless scandals and duplicity that characterized Ford ’13, one modestly professional performance hardly counts for a hill of beans. It won’t change anyone’s opinion about Ford, though he’s clearly in re-run posture and posturing. Nothing about Ford has shifted in the past few weeks, except about 30 pounds of blubber that has fallen off his frame, as he continues his workout transfiguration and alleged no-drinking regime, though trolling through at least one watering hole in brazen pursuit of votes, somehow confusing photo-op enthusiasm from elbow-benders with actual elector support.

He’s clearly also playing the pity card. Pathetic, more like. Meanie Wynne won’t even do him the politesse of a return phone call or email or text, which Ford — tugging at the forlorn caricature he’s created — now claims would suffice. Our foundling mayor will leave no gambit un-turned.

Wynne is many things, including an unelected minority premier dodging the ballot box, with her preference for serial by-elections, and head of a controversy-plagued government. But, unlike Ford, Wynne isn’t an idiot. And she has council’s own semi-impeachment of Ford to justify her back-handing the mayor. As Wynne reasonably has noted, Ford’s fellow councillors did the stripping, made Kelly the go-to guy. There’s no valid reason for the premier to do business with the eclipsed Ford, who quite palpably is merely looking to polish his credibility chops in the re-election campaign.

This isn’t about ignoring Toronto. I dare say Kelly can make the case for Queen’s Park to pick up part of the $114 million the city is seeking from the province and the feds to cover storm costs. Kelly has confirmed he will be attending Friday’s meeting of GTA mayors convened by Mississauga Mayor Hazel McCallion to discuss storm compensation.

Ford is schlepping along, too. He was invited.

Kelly’s presence has got up the nose of Councillor Doug Ford.

“There’s one person that’s taken the lead in the city, it’s the mayor,” he told reporters during a city hall scrum yesterday. “There’s one person responsible for heading the city, not only municipally but nationally and internationally. If the deputy mayor wants to crash the party, so be it.

“Yeah, he’s over-reaching, but the whole scenario is ridiculous now.”

It is that, indeed.

Continuing his little hissy fit, Doug Ford called the premier childish and embarrassing. Golly, Ford used the word “embarrassing” to describe Wynne rather than his spectacularly mortifying brother.

“This is politics from the premier, this is politics from the deputy mayor, and that’s about as far as I’m going to go with this.”

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As if.

Kelly responded sardonically: “That’s Doug being Doug.”

But there was certainly politicking afoot in both the accusation that Wynne is indulging in a grudge-match with Ford — payback for Ford’s campaigning on behalf of ally Doug Holyday, successful Tory candidate in the Etobicoke-Lakeshore by-election last August — a complete media invention, and the comments over the premier’s cold-shouldering by Andrea Horwath. The NDP leader, who has propped up the minority Liberal government for self-serving reasons of her own, primly sniffed: “I was raised in a family that common courtesy was an important value, and so I think the common courtesy of a response to a mayor’s request for a meeting is something that’s pretty easy to fulfill.”

Not as easy to fulfill, however, as the imperative of integrity that could have forced Ontario to the polls over the Liberal budget. In the change-lobsters-and-dance cynicism that defines politics, Horwath has opted to swing with Ford in this round.

I wish, like Wynne, the media could ignore Ford also. But he’s not only a figurehead; he’s the incumbent mayor hot for a second term. And he’s totally in campaigning mode already, exploiting not just the profile enjoyed as mayor-in-situ but the inverse of notoriety as well, what bro’ Doug, his campaign manager, has likened to rock star celebrity.

Ford the Elder exclaimed of Ford the Younger’s reception last Saturday at the nightclub Muzik: “There have been rock stars, there have been sports heroes, there’s been the Bieber there, and no one got a response like Rob did.”

Justin Bieber dropped into Muzik with his then (possibly again) girlfriend Selena Gomez in the summer of 2012. The couple, unlike the mayor, was not shilling for attention. But hey, typical Ford hyperbole, still failing to grasp that a great many of those people cozying up to the mayor for cellphone snaps view him as sideshow, whether posing outside a crack house, on the Danforth or at a nightclub. “And here I am with Toronto’s crack-smoking mayor ...”

Campaign blah-blah from the mayor and his No. 1 Ford junkie, which will be unrelenting until Oct. 27.

The Rofo and Dofo Show.

Rosie DiManno usually appears Monday, Wednesday, Friday and Saturday.

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