Suffice it to say that the EPA’s approval rating isn’t particularly high in Texas, especially among some state officials and the energy-producing companies it regulates.

This is unfortunate and counterproductive. The Environmental Protection Agency plays an important role in Texas, which has been slow to strike the right balance between public health and energy-related jobs. Texas often seems more interested in fighting regulators than getting in line. This newspaper has largely supported the EPA’s mission, as should anyone who wants clean air and water today and for future generations.

And this makes it all the more important that Al Armendariz resigned Sunday as administrator for EPA Region 6, which covers Texas, Oklahoma, Arkansas, Louisiana, New Mexico and 66 tribal nations. Whatever good the former Southern Methodist University professor did since his November 2009 appointment, he brought it all crashing down with one staggeringly inappropriate analogy.

Armendariz shared his enforcement philosophy at a May 2010 public meeting in the North Texas town of Dish, in video that surfaced last week. Armendariz acknowledges the tale may seem “crude” but tells it anyway. In the Middle Ages, he said, the Romans would enter a troublesome village, “take the first five guys they saw and crucify them.” Then the town would be “really easy to manage for the next few years.”

His point was to take energy companies thought to be breaking the law and make cautionary tales of them. Unfortunately, what Armendariz did was hand every oil and gas driller in five states a built-in defense against any future enforcement action by the EPA, which identifies violators and assesses penalties.

Armendariz’s “crucify” blunder forever undercut his credibility as an independent arbiter. Instead of viewing the EPA as an impartial protector of public health, suspicious oil and gas producers, guilty or not, would have screamed that the agency had targeted them for head-on-a-spike justice.

Given this window into Armendariz’s thinking, every future Region 6 enforcement action would have been tainted.

In his resignation announcement, Armendariz wrote that neither EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson nor anyone else in the Obama administration had asked him to step aside, that he decided himself that he “had become too much of a distraction.”

The point isn’t whether you share Armendariz’s views as an environmental advocate. It’s whether you believe a federal regulator can be fair and even-handed in enforcing the law. By his own words, Armendariz indicated he could not.