Gov. Pat McCrory is not one to heed U.S. Rep. Charles Brownson’s advice.

Brownson, an Indiana Republican, is the first person credited with the cautionary coinage known as Greener’s Law: “I never quarrel with a man who buys ink by the barrel.”

McCrory and the North Carolina Republican Party have declared all-out war on the state’s two largest newspapers, The Charlotte Observer and the News & Observer of Raleigh.

In a Saturday news release, McCrory blasted the papers for their “distorted” coverage of the governor’s role in extending a prison maintenance contract for the Keith Corp., run by campaign donor and friend Graeme Keith Sr.

McCrory said the newspapers sought to mislead readers with an “absurd and false headline” and twice cited “cropped photographs,” though specific objections to the images aren’t spelled out. We surmise he’s referring to a Charlotte Observer file photo of the then-Charlotte mayor with his arm around Keith during a 2007 Christmas party.

The story published Saturday in the Raleigh and Charlotte papers quotes McCrory as saying he was unaware Keith demanded a contract extension citing his support of the governor’s campaign. The statement was made to prison officials and there’s no claim that McCrory was personally involved in any quid pro quo. The FBI is investigating.

McCrory’s condemnation parroted a release sent six hours earlier by state GOP Executive Director Dallas Woodhouse, who called the story “a malicious attack piece.” Woodhouse’s statement, which managed to be shorter yet shriller, even taunted the papers’ parent company with a graph of the McClatchy Co.’s declining stock prices.

On Oct. 19, Woodhouse said an Oct. 17 N&O editorial favorable to Attorney General Roy Cooper, McCrory’s main opponent in the 2016 governor’s race, should be reported as an in-kind campaign contribution. The GOP erroneously called the piece an editorial endorsement — while it compliments Cooper and slams legislative leaders, it does not endorse Cooper’s candidacy over McCrory’s.

We asked state party spokeswoman Kara Carter if Republicans really believe newspaper editorials should be considered political advertising, since such a naive view would be out of step with the First Amendment. We also asked her to suggest the value of such an “in-kind contribution,” as editorials are not for sale at any price. She didn’t reply to our email.

Perhaps all this bizarre bellyaching is designed to score points with voters who buy into the myth of liberal media bias.

While we don’t dispute that editorial pages in Charlotte and Raleigh skew left, we hope fair-minded conservatives understand there’s a firewall between news and opinion and will evaluate political reporting on its own merits.

The prison contract story is a thorough piece of investigative journalism. Two of its three authors, Ames Alexander and Joseph Neff, were named finalists for a Pulitzer Prize in 2013.

McCrory quibbles about a headline that could have been written better and a photo he doesn’t like because people not central to the story were presumably cropped out. That hardly warrants the hyperbole in his searing statement.

Our governor is using his bully pulpit to beat up newspapers for doing their job — seeking and reporting the truth. It’s time for McCrory to trade his shoot-the-messenger mentality for the maturity of a true statesman.

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A Daily Journal editorial