Editorial:

We’ve got to hand it to Devin Dwyer. It was an inspired idea.

The Huntington Beach City Councilman, livid over the 12th parking ticket he received for failing to move his car in time for the street sweeper, made a double-edged threat before Monday’s council meeting: If the city didn’t change its street-sweeping policy, he would (a) rip up his ticket at the meeting and (b) resign from the council.

Dwyer made the most of his threat, even posing for a picture in the Orange County Register that showed him scowling into the camera while holding his ticket with both hands as if he were about to shred it in two. Police Chief Ken Small countered with admirable coolness, telling the Register that Dwyer could still pay his citation online even if the ticket became history.

Then Monday’s council meeting arrived, and, as Huntington Beach held its collective breath, Dwyer kept his ticket intact and stayed on the council. Making good on his promise, he explained, would be “a bit theatrical.”

Are we surprised? Not very.

Dwyer has spent less than a year on the dais and no doubt has plenty on his agenda before his first term ends in 2012. However annoying it is to pay a parking ticket, the pain of shelling out a few dollars is surely preferable to that of tossing one’s political career out the window.

And while we hate to sound preachy, maybe Dwyer deserved another parking ticket for failing to avoid the street sweeper, because, after all, he had been ticketed for the same offense 11 times before.

That said, we’re a little disappointed that Dwyer didn’t go through with his plan. OK, maybe resigning from the council would be extreme. But there’s nothing like a good ticket-shredding to liven a City Council meeting.

Politics is usually a dry business, dominated by spreadsheets, committee reports and hearings that continue late into the night. We hail politicians like Barack Obama as demigods while they’re running for office, then find ourselves disappointed when they get elected and have to deal with the usual checks and balances.

If Obama had printed out Sarah Palin’s Facebook comment about the death panels and ripped it up before Congress, now, that would have shown he meant business. And it might have quelled a few fears about his lack of authority.

As Small pointed out, there’s probably no way Dwyer could get out of paying his ticket. But for all the residents who have similarly been irked by street-sweeping regulations, a colorful protest on the dais might have proved inspirational.

Instead, we’ll probably have to wait for street-sweeping to crop up on a future council agenda. And for rabble-rousing political entertainment, we’ll just have to settle for Michael Moore.