Just in time for New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie to announce he is running for president, the local papers in Jersey revisited an episode that shows exactly why the 52-year-old should never be entrusted with that kind of power.

Leave aside New Jersey’s 6.5% unemployment rate, which has barely budged in the past year as we’ve been bypassed by post-housing-bust basket cases California, Georgia and Michigan. Maybe that’s not Christie’s fault. And why dwell upon his failure to fund the pension-reform deal he pushed through the Legislature in 2011, or the three bond downgrades on his watch?

No, let’s talk about one of the first, most prosaic and most revealing decisions Christie made — turning down $8 billion in stimulus money to build a rail tunnel under the Hudson River in 2010.

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In a state where 90,000 people commute by train to New York, that decision mattered. Delays getting in and out of the two existing tunnels routinely add 10 minutes to everybody’s commute — times 90,000 people, times 250 work days a year. Christie had a story, later debunked by the Government Accountability Office, about how he knew there would be cost overruns the state would have to pay on the federally financed project.

But it was really about scoring points with a Republican base that loathed the stimulus.

By this year, Christie admitted reality, endorsing a plan that will arrive years later, that costs far more, and that lacks federal backing. (Similarly, he accepted fiscal reality and accepted Obamacare’s federally funded Medicaid expansion, even as New Jersey didn’t build a health-insurance exchange.)

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It’s classic Christie — a short-sighted decision, all about him. Take it from Jersey — where he has a 30% approval rating — what you see is what you get.

This week, NJ.com published a piece about what may happen when either of the two existing tunnels connecting New Jersey and Manhattan has to close for a year’s worth of reconstruction, which Amtrak, the tunnels’ owner, says will be needed sometime in the next 20 years. It’ll be a mess that extends out to Route 287, halfway to Pennsylvania.

“Everyone will be affected, including people who are not on the system” to and from New York, Jeffrey Zupan, Regional Plan Association senior fellow, told the paper. “If you drive, more people will be driving. With one million trips a day, everyone will be affected, not just train people.”

Trust me: Commuters talk about Christie during the waits even now. Not every day, but often enough. At least his people closed the George Washington Bridge to make political points for only a few days.

A president’s job is to think long term, and that’s a test Christie just can’t pass.

While Christie was turning down the tunnel money, President Obama financed factories for Nissan, Tesla TSLA, +1.63% and Ford F, -4.97% to make tomorrow’s electric cars and more fuel-efficient gas engines for today. (If you’re in deep-red Texas and love your F-150 EcoBoost pickup, thank the president.) New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo built a factory to lure SolarCity SCTY, -4.85% and other solar-energy players to Buffalo and create 5,000 jobs, while Christie used $82 million of economic-development money to convince the Philadelphia 76ers to move their practice facility across the river to Camden.

And they’ll still play the games in Philly. As economic-development seer Allen Iverson put it: “We ain’t talking about the game. We’re talking about practice, man.”

Christie’s campaign is built around a certain style — his particular combination of rudeness and candor. There are times when it’s appealing, as when he defended a newly appointed judge who happened to be a Muslim against what he called the ignorant “crazies” who had wanted the nomination shelved.

But five years in, New Jerseyans know that the trait yielding all those YouTube worthy confrontations where he calls people idiots or chases them down a Boardwalk with an ice-cream cone wears thin.

Christie called that truth-telling in his announcement, but in Jersey we know that it’s really of a piece with his administration’s bad judgment and short-sightedness.

We know he rarely passes up a short-term sound bite, even if it means 200-plus school districts lose their superintendents so Christie can get a political sugar high from capping their salaries, reasoning that if he holds his breath long enough he can remake the market. I live in a district whose superintendent left for a job in New York.

When Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes met Franklin Roosevelt, he reported the president had a second-class intellect but a first-class temperament, marked by cool under fire and putting others first. I’ll leave Christie alone about his middle-tier education (University of Delaware and Seton Hall Law School), but his temperament speaks for itself.