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Caesar crossed the Rubicon, but a Hudson River crossing may do Gov. Chris Christie in.

(Patti Sapone/The Star-Ledger)

Washington Post columnist George F. Will once compared Chris Christie to Julius Caesar in his power. But the true comparison may lie in a memorable line spoken by Cassius in Shakespeare's famed play: "The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, but in ourselves."

The governor’s got no one but himself to blame for the mess he’s in. If you doubt that, ask yourself what he might have done if he and his kids had been stranded in traffic on the opening day of school.

Imagine Christie awakening on the morning of Sept. 9 and finding that the main highway in Mendham was blocked for a "traffic study." Imagine that the public officials who designed that study had failed to tell local police, thereby ensuring a jam that would make it impossible to get from one side of town to the other. Now imagine the titanic rage into which our notoriously short-fused governor would erupt.

When that happened in Fort Lee, however, the governor didn’t lift a finger to stop it. In fact, he didn’t deign to apologize to the parents of those kids and the drivers of those gridlocked cars until four months after the fact — and then only after emails from his tribunes surfaced linking his administration to the lane closures at the George Washington Bridge. Christie even claimed that he believed the "traffic study" behind those closures was legitimate right up until he read those emails earlier this month.

The joint committee investigating Bridgegate held its first organizational meeting Tuesday afternoon. But Christie didn’t fare much better in that session than Caesar did in that fateful meeting of the Roman Senate on the Ides of March in 44 B.C.

The meeting began with the minority Republicans angling for restrictions on the committee’s subpoena power. The apparent goal was to keep key administration officials from facing the same sort of questions before the committee that they could later face in the ongoing investigation by the U.S. Attorney’s Office.

The majority Democrats voted that down. The political perils for Christie are obvious. Faced with the prospect of possible federal charges, many Christie aides are likely to take the Fifth, as did the mastermind of Bridgegate, David Wildstein, when he came before an Assembly committee earlier this month.

That’s likely to mean one bad headline after another for the governor. When that finally dies down, the U.S. attorney’s probe should be heating up. More bad press for the man who was until recently regarded as the front-runner for the 2016 GOP presidential nomination.

All of this could have been avoided if the governor had dealt with this scandal when it first surfaced. Those emails indicate his staff was contacted even during the blockage. And the committee co-chair, state Sen. Loretta Weinberg, said yesterday that she went before the Port Authority board four times after the closures asking for information. She was stonewalled every time, she said. The answers didn’t come until Port Authority officials were subpoenaed.

State Sen. Loretta Weinberg talks to the press after a meeting Monday of the joint commitee investigating Bridgegate. Assemblyman John Wisniewski, who chairs the committee, is in the background.

The Bergen County Democrat, whose district includes Fort Lee, also said she sent the governor a letter Sept. 19 asking about the reason for the lane shutdowns. Again the letter went unanswered, she said.

"The lack of curiosity was curious," Weinberg said yesterday.

Also curious, she said, was the way Christie repeated at a December news conference that spin about Fort Lee having "three dedicated lanes" to the bridge. In fact those lanes are open to traffic from all the surrounding towns in the most heavily populated part of the state.

Here’s another curious aspect of the scandal: If that lane-closure plan had gone through, the effect would have been to improve access for out-of-state drivers on I-95 at the expense of Jersey drivers who live near the bridge.

That’s like Caesar siding with the Gauls and the Huns against his fellow Romans. Put it all together and it doesn’t look good for the leader of "Nova Caesarea," the formal name the leaders of Britannia gave our colony.

Christie's supporter are trying to blame his enemies. But they might as well try to blame his horoscope. I just looked it up for Sept. 9, 2013: "Be careful with behind-the-scenes activity, especially if you're doing something secretive or sneaky because things will not go as smoothly as you hope."

Hmmm, maybe there’s something to this astrology business after all.