Team Trump said Tuesday that it wouldn’t cooperate with impeachment efforts in the House, and Dems have only themselves to blame: Rigging a hyperpartisan set of rules and choosing a manifestly unsuitable ringleader in Rep. Adam Schiff, liberals have prepared a charade that will only delegitimize the process.

First, to dispense with a recurring liberal myth: While dramatic, Team Trump’s action is hardly ­unprecedented. In 2012, the Obama White House ­rejected congressional subpoenas related to the investigation into the Fast and Furious gunrunning scandal.

Unlike the scandal surrounding President Trump’s phone call with his Ukrainian counterpart, whose potential consequences are wholly political, the Fast and Furious program led to the deaths of American law enforcement officers and dozens of Mexican nationals.

Yet Team Obama called the probe “political theater.” Then-House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi agreed that the White House didn’t have to cooperate with GOP demands. When the ­Republican majority voted to hold Attorney General Eric Holder in contempt for failure to cooperate, Pelosi walked off the House floor in protest.

Now Pelosi would have you believe the impeachment attempt she is pursuing isn’t political theater, and the White House is acting lawless by not participating.

What’s really unprecedented is this: House Democrats are pursuing impeachment without holding a vote to authorize an official impeachment inquiry. Impeachment is a political, not legal, process, and Democrats can rewrite the rules if they like. But the more political impeachment becomes, the more it justifies a political response from the White House, and the less credibility impeachment will have with the public.

The reasons for not holding a vote on opening an impeachment inquiry appear to be self-interested and craven, which only underscores the White House’s point. Authorizing an impeachment inquiry would give the Republican minority the right to call its own witnesses and otherwise participate in the investigation. And it would impose political accountability on House Democrats in swing districts that went for Trump in 2016.

House Democrats are also floating the idea of keeping the whistleblower’s identity a secret, even though the Intelligence Community inspector general has noted that the whistleblower has “some indicia of an arguable political bias … in favor of a rival political candidate” to Trump. A more recent report by The Washington Examiner’s Byron York quotes sources saying the whistleblower has a “working relationship” with a current 2020 Democratic candidate.

Telling the president he can’t face his accuser is unlikely to convince the public that this process is in any way fair.

Then there is Schiff, whom Pelosi has put in charge of the ­impeachment efforts. The integrity of the man leading this process isn’t a trivial matter, and Schiff has distinguished himself for untrustworthiness.

Schiff has already been caught lying on TV about staffers on his own intelligence committee being in contact with the Ukraine-call whistleblower before the formal complaint that led to the current impeachment efforts was filed.

Schiff’s conduct during the Russia investigation was also unbecoming of a member of Congress. He acquired a deserved reputation for saying outrageous, unsupportable things about the investigation on cable news. During Trump’s first year in office, a GOP news release noted Schiff spent 20 hours, 44 minutes and 49 seconds on television.

Schiff’s office has also been ­notorious for leaking. In 2017, CNN, NBC and CBS all erroneously ­reported that Donald Trump Jr. had been sent the hacked DNC Wikileaks emails in advance, potential proof of “collusion” with Russia. It turned out the date on the email was wrongly reported. Trump Jr. got the emails after they were already public and had done nothing wrong.

When asked about the source of this leak, a spokesman for Adam Schiff offered a non-denial denial, telling Politico “that neither he nor his staff leaked any ‘non-public information’ ” about Trump Jr.

Given the bad faith and lack of transparency and due process that have characterized this impeachment drive, opponents of the president will once more end up violating more important norms than Trump stands accused of disregarding.

Impeachment is a gravely serious step to take, as it threatens to overturn the will of voters. So far, Democrats aren’t taking the impeachment process seriously. So they should not be surprised that Trump isn’t taking it seriously, either.

Mark Hemingway is a senior writer at RealClearInvestigations. Twitter: @Heminator

