Maybe they should change their name to the Committee for Better Mis-Representation.

That’s our first thought, with allegations this week that freeholder Matt Ryan has been “ghostwriting” letters to the editor in support of the proposed Kitsap County charter – letters that supporters were to sign and claim as their own.

As reported elsewhere in this edition, the issue came to light when an e-mail message to that effect was errantly sent to an alleged newspaper in Bremerton. By Thursday evening, Ryan and South Kitsap’s Jim Martin, who chaired the pro-charter Committee for Better Representation, had fallen on their swords and left the campaign.

In a letter to the Review and several other publications, Ryan intoned:

“Please consider the Charter on its merits and not on my actions in support of it.”

We certainly will – it’s an

ill-conceived and partisan document that should be voted down, and we urge readers to do so.

A loyal Review reader who supports the charter was dismayed by the news, but felt Ryan and Martin took the honorable way out. “I’m glad to hear (they) resigned from the pro-charter group,” he wrote to us. “It saved the trouble of expelling them.” We too are disappointed in Ryan, a generally thoughtful gentleman whose words have graced this page from time to time. But we won’t take him to the woodshed. In truth, this type of chicanery has become all too common.

Last year, a writer to one of the Seattle dailies noted that a letter that paper ran, extolling the virtues of the Bush platform – giving tax breaks to the obscenely wealthy, despoiling the arctic wilderness for oil, or some such – appeared simultaneously in an East Coast newspaper, attributed to a different writer there. Turns out that the text had been downloaded from a GOP website that provides “boilerplate” copy for those too lazy or too dull to come up with their own opinions.

A few weeks later, the Review itself was similarly deceived – this time, by the anti-Bush crowd. Scathingly pro-environment letters with different “authors” but identical text were submitted both to this newspaper and the Bremerton daily (the same sheet that this week exposed Ryan’s hoodwinkery).

Our friend Matt happened to be the one who got caught, but we find the whole trend dismaying no matter who is doing it. We consider the letters column sacred ground – it’s the readers’ own space, a place of free-flowing discourse. If we can’t assume honesty on the part of participants, it will never be a fair gauge of community sentiment and opinion.

So, simply put: Write your own letters! You don’t have to

possess one of the great minds of the age, but at least use the one you were given.

With regard to the Kitsap County charter, we do find ourselves in an awkward position. Should we now continue to run letters of dubious authorship? (The Bremerton sheet, we note, has cut off all charter letters, pro and con.)

After some reflection, we’ve decided to err on the side of free discourse – we will continue to run letters for and against the charter, throughout the campaign that ends Feb. 5. This includes off-island letters, as they come in and as space allows.

But readers may want to take the “pros” with a caveat – imagine each with the co-signature “Matt Ryan, Brownsville.”