Don't think for a minute that New Jersey Sen. Michael Doherty's placement on the legislative committee investigating the George Washington Bridge scandal signals the Christie administration will be handled with kid gloves.

That was a popular sentiment last week as the panel took shape and naysayers pointed to the conservative Doherty's past dalliances with the governor's office.

But that's ancient history.

Whether or not you agree with his ideology, Doherty is a shrewd politician and sharp attorney who has integrity. He'll give a fair hearing to the evidence presented to the committee and be guided by his sense of right and wrong.

The notion that he's a lackey for

should have gone out the window months ago.

By last fall, with Christie making headlines for deciding on a special election to fill the late Frank Lautenberg's U.S. Senate seat, it was evident that Doherty was at odds in many places with the Christie machine's political strategies. It had been months in the making.

"It's his way or the highway in many respects," Doherty said of the governor during a visit to The Express-Times in October. "If you don't do what he wants, he has a long memory."

Doherty said then that he wasn't even certain he'd support a Christie run for president -- a movement that looks a lot shakier these days then it did before Bridge-gate.

"I see myself more likely supporting someone like Rand Paul," Doherty said.

Two years earlier, he was singing the proverbial different tune.

Doherty, whose predominantly Republican district covers parts of

and

counties, had opposed Christie's decision to close

. At crunch time in 2011, though, Doherty abstained on a Senate bill that would have overridden Christie's line-item veto and restored $9 million for patient care, salaries and wages for mental health services in the Department of Human Services.

Doherty has flatly said he felt his abstaining -- recorded as a "no" vote -- would bring him more personal bargaining power with the rising star governor. Even if it meant stiffing the folks back home.

Well, that hasn't exactly worked out.

Christie has long tormented the state's public school teachers union. So when Doherty began championing his Fair School Funding plan, he had hoped Christie would embrace it. He didn't.

The school funding formula would provide the same amount of school aid to every student in New Jersey, no matter where they live. Doherty said it would correct imbalances in the state's funding formula, which sends 60 percent of state education dollars to just 20 percent of the schools.

Another interesting note to Doherty's appointment on the Senate Select Committee on Investigation has been his distaste for bridge authorities.

Doherty has led the fight for reforms on the

, which is laden with patronage and bureaucracy and wants to spend $450 million on a new toll bridge to replace one that's structurally sound. The DRJTBC is dwarfed in all those areas by the Port Authority of New York & New Jersey, which oversees the George Washington Bridge.

All this comes as the state Republican Party suddenly finds itself looking for a new course, with leader-in-waiting and Christie political strategist Bill Septien caught up in the swell of the bridge scandal.

Doherty and plenty of other Republicans in the Garden State may have a different view on where to take the GOP.

A plum assignment to help hold the wolves at bay? Hardly.

Consider it an opportunity. One Doherty likely won't want to waste.