This is exactly what the Base Realignment and Closure process was supposed to put an end to: political power plays endangering our nation’s defense.

New Jersey politicians last week seized on a routine Government Accountability Office progress report on BRAC to try to subvert the process.

Understandably, they want to keep Fort Monmouth open. They want to keep the jobs and overall economic impact there. Of course they do.

But that should not be the basis for setting our nation’s defense priorities.

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Experts in our Department of Defense determined more than three years ago that the best place in America for much of the 90-year-old New Jersey fort’s mission is Aberdeen Proving Ground in Harford County.

That recommendation was among 222 involving 837 BRAC actions that the Defense Department submitted to the Defense Base Closure and Realignment Commission. GAO reviewed the entire process and testified before the commission. Congress studied and approved the recommendations. President Bush signed them into law.

Our nation initiated the entire BRAC process and the commission to take the traumatic process of base closings out of the hands of politicians.

That method resulted in military decisions vital to the future safety of our nation being made not on the basis of strategic strength, but on political clout.

The very people we elect to protect us put us at risk. No senators or representatives wanted to lose anything in their home states or districts.

Now, New Jersey politicians are trying to push the old political fast shuffle back into the process.

If they get away with it, the whole strategically sound, politically isolated, untainted BRAC mechanism could fall apart.

What New Jersey is waving around like battle flags is a routine GAO progress report on specific implementation of general BRAC recommendations and a 32-page (out of millions of pages) report by biased Fort Monmouth personnel.

OK. Projects are going to cost more than the very rough initial “guesstimates.” Golly, a federal project is going to cost more than originally projected? Stop the presses!

Even GAO admits its report is intended to help in implementing BRAC recommendations, not to change those recommendations. These routine findings certainly cannot become weapons used to sabotage our national defense priorities.

New Jersey wants Congress to take the dangerous, unprecedented move of reversing the proper functioning of BRAC by distorting normal and anticipated adjustments in this massive, extraordinarily complex process.

Maryland’s delegation is duty bound — not just to those of us it represents in this state, but to the entire nation — to halt this attempt to undermine something as fundamental to effective defense as weapons systems and highly trained boots on the ground.