There are few — if any — members of Congress who started out like Rep. Pat Meehan of the Philadelphia suburbs, who got trained as a hockey ref by the NHL before he went back to school and earned his law degree.

Since then, the Cheltenham native has forged a big-league political career for himself through his own brand of hockey-ref tough justice — and his specialty was handing down the game-misconduct penalty.

Just ask Corey Kemp, who was Philadelphia’s ill-fated city treasurer in the early 2000s. Ensnared in a sweeping city corruption probe when Meehan, a Republican, was the Philadelphia U.S. attorney, Kemp was sentenced to a whopping 10 years for those offenses, a draconian penalty whose severity shocked even those who’d been thrilled to see the feds finally coming down on the corruption that was once endemic in City Hall.

But that was the Pat Meehan brand — unrelenting and harsh when it came to corruption in the public sphere. A few years later, Meehan voiced anger when former state Sen. Vince Fumo was only sentenced to 55 months.

His success as a prosecutor propelled Meehan to Congress in Pennsylvania’s freakishly gerrymandered 7th Congressional District in 2010, with constant talk of higher office.

But here’s the thing: A politician who lives by his ethics can die by his ethics.

Saturday’s stunning report from The New York Times that Meehan’s office used thousands of taxpayer dollars to settle and thus keep quiet allegations by a young female former aide that Meehan had created a hostile work environment after she’d spurned his romantic advances was like ripping the core Jenga block from the suddenly collapsing foundation of the congressman’s career.

The scenario laid out in the article raises serious questions about the judgment and morals of the congressman, who is a 62-year-old married father of three.

Meehan hasn’t personally addressed the allegation, which seems to be par for the course for a congressman who also hasn’t had a public town hall meeting in his district in years. His spokesman said he “denies the allegations.”

But based on the Times’ reporting, Meehan — like other congressmen before him — benefited from a secretive system of quasi-justice that is stacked toward protecting the powerful, keeping their misdeeds secret from the voting public, and sticking taxpayers with the bill.

We don’t know how many of our tax dollars were paid out because — incredibly — the process allows any payouts to be “disguised” as salary over a period of months. This setup that has allowed members of Congress to get away with acts of sexual harassment or worse sure sounds a lot like, to borrow a phrase, “a culture of corruption” — with suckers like you and me paying for it.

Meanwhile, Meehan was also one of the GOP’s chosen representatives on the House Ethics Committee, where he was tasked with investigating sexual misconduct by his colleagues and never thought to disclose his own problems — and the potential conflict of interest.

His actions toward his staff, as reported by the Times, are shocking and unconscionable. What’s more, it makes a mockery of his years of pious and — it’s now clear — hypocritical statements about public corruption, holding the powerful to account, and protecting the taxpayer from their outrages.

Pat Meehan needs to apologize to everyone involved — including the residents of Delaware County and the other suburbs shoehorned into the 7th District — and then he needs to resign. Today, if possible.

Let’s be honest — Pat Meehan never sold himself to voters as a policy genius, or as someone deeply rooted in the community, or — given his lack of town meetings — as a beacon of transparency. His one and only selling point was his ethics, and without ethics, this congressman is nothing. It’s time to say goodbye to Congress and to the patriarchy that it protects with our money. Time’s up, Rep. Meehan.

This column first appeared in The Philadelphia Inquirer.