Friday marked the long-coming departure of William O’Neill from the Ohio Supreme Court, and we say good riddance.

Now planning to run for governor, O’Neill resigned and has asked the Ohio Democratic Party to vet him as a precursor to participating in debates for the anticipated five-way Democratic gubernatorial nomination in the May 8 primary elections. We are happy to do the vetting for the Dems. And to end the suspense, here’s our bottom line: William O’Neill was not fit to serve on the Ohio Supreme Court, and we certainly don’t need him in the governor’s office.

The evidence for our view abounds. It began with his initial run for the high court in 2004, when he first came under criticism for overstepping judicial codes of conduct by promoting his party affiliation in what is supposed to be a nonpartisan race and charging that campaign contributions amount to selling seats on the court. O’Neill said the judicial ethics violated his free-speech rights; later he won a court battle to identify himself as a Democrat in the general election.

In his second unsuccessful race in 2006, O’Neill continued waving his partisan banner, pushing the envelope on standards cautioning judicial candidates from signaling a bias on cases that may come before them. Never mind that he was then an appeals-court judge who should have been more judicial in his conduct.

O’Neill was finally victorious in his third campaign for the high court in 2012, but his tenure there has been anything but charming. The Dispatch reported in 2014 that O’Neill had a history of state and federal tax liens, with 16 totaling more than $60,000 filed against him since 1992. Records indicate he has settled up, with taxes and interest paid as recently as last month.

But O’Neill has continued to press boundaries of ethics and propriety in recent months, raising serious questions about his fitness for the state’s highest elective office.

In October, he announced his intent to run for this fall’s open race to succeed lame-duck Gov. John Kasich, but O’Neill refused to abide by judicial canons that say a judge who becomes a candidate for a nonjudicial elected office must leave the bench. True to previous practice of interpreting ethics in his own favor, O’Neill claimed he would not actually become a candidate until filing petitions to run by the Feb. 7 deadline.

It’s interesting but not surprising that his interpretation of not being a candidate didn’t stop him from announcing his running mate earlier this month. In selecting Chantelle Lewis, an African-American elementary school principal in Lorain, O’Neill — the non-candidate — praised Lewis for bringing balance to his campaign.

And then there was his horrendous November Facebook post, which was mercifully deleted, in which the 70-year-old widower incredibly inserted himself into the national firestorm over reports of sexual misconduct on the part of other elected officials and celebrities, by boasting of his own couplings with 50 "attractive" and "accomplished" women. If he so horribly misjudged the current justified outcry against uninvited and predatory sexual advances and outright assaults, what else doesn’t he understand about today’s important issues?

To repeat: Ohio doesn’t need William O’Neill in the governor’s office.

— Columbus Dispatch