If a betting man had looked at statistics comparing Butler County’s coronavirus cases and Lawrence County’s cases, there would be lots of money bet on Lawrence County waiting longer to open up for business.

But nowhere in the numbers is there a multiple for politics. Butler County, as all counties do, has an odd number of county commissioners. That is so there is never a deadlock on votes and business can move smoothly in most cases.

So there has to be a majority and a minority party. Butler County has two Republicans in office. Admittedly that is almost always the case in Butler County.

Lawrence County has two Democratic commissioners and one Republican. The reigning governor of the commonwealth of Pennsylvania is a Democrat.

Enough said?

We do believe that if those representative parties were reversed, so would which county got blessed with the OK to open. There just isn’t any other rationale.

Wolf hasn’t been good for Western Pennsylvania at any point, and his decision making concerning business waivers and now these grand reopening days is troublesome.

His failure to disclose the list of businesses that received special waivers to remain open, including his own family cabinet business, reeks.

Despite all that, we oppose Republicans threatening to subpoena the governor to get this information the same way we thought it was wrong for Democrats to hound the president with the collusion charges and impeachment — all while the nation was facing the beginning of the pandemic.

In each case, the elected person should have been left to do their job. Nothing was accomplished through the impeachment process, and nothing will happen from a subpoena of Wolf. Wasteful spending due to political games is prevalent from both parties.

We know there will be many disappointed people over the further delay ordered for Butler County.

But the flip side of it is that someone else is going to be the guinea pig for this. If it turns out the timing is correct and we aren’t at worse risk for opening, then we lost another week.

If it becomes an issue of cases escalating drastically or even moderately, we will have dodged a bullet. Our county has done great through this crazy situation. People have tried very hard to do the best thing for family and neighbors even though it was horribly rough on businesses. We can testify to how hard it has been to keep the doors open and to pay the bills.

But fortunately, we have not had any one of our 100-plus employees get sick and test positive. We have suffered and obeyed the same rules as every other business. It isn’t good for us to have our lifeline of advertisers closed. But it would be worse to have a second wave of the virus come immediately on top of this current one.

Maybe Gov. Wolf was looking out for us and letting the others take the worse risk? Maybe not, but we can look for the sound reasoning for another week while we wait. But somehow we need all these decision makers to learn the word fair and start practicing it without regard to where we live in the state and by whom we are represented.