Leonard Lance is ready for a fight.

“We’ll go negative too, although I hate to do it,” Lance said Thursday before addressing the Roxbury Rotary Club.

He already has, in fact.

For his part, Tom Malinowski, the Democratic candidate in CD-7, this week started running negative ads criticizing Lance for, among other things, voting to increase his pay as a state legislator.

Lance says he’s ready to respond to the latest round and he gave a preview of what form his counter-offensive will take.

“He’s a carpetbagger,”  he said of Malinowski. “He moved to New Jersey just to run for Congress.”

Malinowski is a former State Department official under the Obama administration. Upon leaving that job, he relocated to Rocky Hill.

Lance suggested that Malinowski’s connection to the Garden State is tenuous at best.

“If he loses, he will have nothing more to do with New Jersey, in my opinion,” Lance said.

Such talk seems a bit out of character for Lance, who takes pride in gentlemanly behavior and who usually eschews rhetorical attacks.

Then again, it’s safe to assume Lance never has had such a serious challenge since getting elected to Congress 10 years ago.

Following his comments, Lance’s address to the Rotary was much more in line with his centrist philosophy.

When a questioner said some Democrats were acting like “spoiled brats,” Lance talked about the Democrats who have worked with him on legislation.

He said he doesn’t care for the fierce anti-Trump rhetoric of Rep. Maxine Waters, a Democrat from California, but quickly added that the president tweets too frequently.

Lance, who opposed the recent federal tax cuts, also took issue with the Trump administration’s enactment of tariffs.

Calling himself a “free trader,” Lance expressed hope that the tariffs will be soon eliminated, noting that they are beginning to adversely impact some businesses in the district.

Lance by his own admission is not exciting.

While that may not garner him many headlines or “clicks,” Lance told the Rotary Club he has no plans to change.

And perhaps for good reason.

“The constituents I serve favor bipartisanship,” he said.