It's not the heat, it's the stupidity.

The stupidity at Queen's Park for the past week over an apparently now-aborted threat by Premier Dalton McGuinty to force a July 19 election.

In the real world, McGuinty's Liberals are third in the polls behind the Conservatives and NDP.

A Forum Research survey showed most Ontarians would blame McGuinty for forcing an unwanted, $100-million election on them, just nine months after the last one.

This despite McGuinty's insistence it would all have been NDP Leader Andrea Horwath's fault for breaking her word about supporting the Liberal budget, now expected to be approved Wednesday.

First, the idea of Dalton "I won't raise your taxes" McGuinty accusing another politician of lying is beyond laughable.

More important, what was McGuinty planning to run on?

The Auditor General's report released after last fall's election, showing McGuinty's green energy boondoggle is costing us billions of dollars extra on our electricity bills?

How about McGuinty's Ornge air ambulance disaster, a scandal Ombudsman Andre Marin raised Tuesday, rightly noting he should have had the authority to probe it before patients started dying, millions of taxpayers dollars were wasted, and the police had to be called in to investigate?

As for McGuinty accusing Horwath of ruining his wonderful budget, that's the budget that caused Moody's Investors Service to downgrade Ontario's credit rating and Standard and Poor's to put us on credit watch.

That's why we've never taken McGuinty's threat to call an election seroiusly.

As for Horwath and the NDP, they need to learn when you announce in April you've reached a deal with the Liberals on their budget to avert an election, it's stupid to play political games in June just so you can pretend to your core constituency that you're opposing the budget, when you're not.

The only party that comes out of this looking good is the Conservatives and their leader, Tim Hudak. They said from day one they wouldn't support the Liberal budget.

Then they called the NDP's bluff by unexpectedly voting with them on some of their amendments, although for reasons consistent with Conservative concerns about the budget, unrelated to the NDP.

As for McGuinty and Horwath, we have two words for them regarding Wednesday's budget vote: Smarten up.