We can at least give Debbie Wachspress credit for realizing she was no longer a viable candidate in the First Congressional District and for getting out of the race quickly.

We can at least give Debbie Wachspress credit for realizing she was no longer a viable candidate in the First Congressional District and for getting out of the race quickly, rather than soldiering on to the detriment of herself and her party’s chances of unseating Republican Rep. Brian Fitzpatrick in November.

The Pennsbury School Board member Thursday walked away from a campaign that had been crippled by a pair of civil rights lawsuits from former administrators at the district. The suits claim top officials harassed and punished them for complaining about racist, homophobic and demeaning language and behavior.

One of the lawsuits specifically names Wachspress, though she denies any wrongdoing.

The situation at Pennsbury is going to get worse before it gets better as additional lawsuits are expected.

Wachspress’s exit seems sure to pave the way for Ivyland Councilwoman Christina Finello to earn the Democratic nomination. Wachspress threw her support to Finello, a solicitor for Bucks County, who also received the endorsement of the Bucks County Democratic Committee. New Hope technology consultant Skylar Hurwitz will oppose Finello in the primary but is considered to be a long shot to win.

Just five weeks ago, the Democratic Primary race looked competitive. Four candidates were running. Bucks County Prothonotary Judi Reiss, the only one of the four who’d won a countywide election, bowed out in January and endorsed Finello.

Wachspress, however, earned the endorsement of Scott Wallace, the last Democrat to face Fitzpatrick, and she had raised nearly $450,000 as of the end of 2019, according to a review of Federal Election Commission campaign finance data. That was more than five times what Finello had raised. Hurwitz raised just $10,323 and $7,000 of that came from his own pocket.

So the well-funded and Wallace-supported Wachspress seemed poised to give Finello a run for her money in April, until last week when Pennsbury’s former director of special education Cheryl A. Morett filed a civil suit in U.S. District Court claiming she was forced out.

Along with Wachspress, the suit names Pennsbury School District, Superintendent William Gretzula, former Assistant Superintendent Donna Dunar, board members Joshua Waldorf and Christine Toy-Dragoni, consultant Jim O’Brien and parent Annette Dearolf.

The suit claims that Morett complained to the district’s human resources director and then to the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission and the Pennsylvania Human Relations Commission that, at various times, including during executive sessions, Dunar, Gretzula, O’Brien, Wachspress and Waldorf all used terms that were homophobic and, in some cases, racist.

It also claims that they, along with the others, engaged in an organized campaign of smearing, belittling, slandering and scapegoating Morett after she complained.

District officials have denied the charges. Wachspress ultimately issued a statement admitting to having used an anti-Semitic term but said it was while relating a story of having been called that word by a classmate when she was a child.

We very much doubt that Wachspress is an anti-Semite. She is Jewish and the former director at the nonprofit Peace Center. In late 2018, she authored a guest opinion about hate after seeing armed guards at her synagogue following the mass shooting at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh.

We believe her actually using an anti-Semitic term to make a point about the evils of anti-Semitism was foolish — not to mention unnecessary. But our bigger concern is that, if the lawsuit’s claims are true, Wachspress seems to have been a willing contributor to a toxic culture in the upper echelon of the Pennsbury School District.

Wachspress insists they are not true. Her Thursday statement announcing the end to her campaign called it an “offensive and completely false narrative of who I am” and characterized herself as the victim of “lies and distortions.”

But if they are true, we don’t want her in Washington, D.C.

We’d prefer that our elected officials, particularly those we send to the U.S. Congress, show the desire and ability to rise above — not get dragged down into — the name-calling, mudslinging and character assassinating that goes on in the swamp.

Any candidate who can’t stay out of the muck while serving on a school board, won’t be able to do it in Washington, D.C. either.