Kim Guadagno will look like a warm-up to the main event of simple statehouse governance, by the looks of it, as InsiderNJ’s tires chopped out of the gravel lot Monday afternoon and let the source receding in the rearview nurse the same irritability he started with on the subject of Democratic gubernatorial candidate Phil Murphy.

The source is a Senate President Steve Sweeney (D-3) ally, and he wondered – without speaking for the senate prez – how Sweeney will be able to shake off the thrice compounded indignity of having a state party chair he thought he made instead opting for Murphy for Governor; Murphy big-footing Sweeney’s carefully wrought statewide candidacy; and then – maybe the cruelest cut of all – having to dogfight the New Jersey Education Association (NJEA) for reelection with nary a word from Murphy, and even the added encumbrance of a Murphy for Gov campaign that inadvertently armed the GOP with twin battleaxes otherwise known as taxes and sanctuary cities.

The humiliations pile up. The bitternesses churn.

In his always tough district, Sweeney will drag across the finish line by single digits if the internal polling if correct, and when he shakes off the dust of the past year, will hardly be in a forgiving – or giving – mood – when it comes to those political desires of political neophyte (and presumed Governor-elect) Murphy. It starts with the war Sweeney has been fighting behind the scenes with Democratic State Party Chairman John Currie, who found his 2017 path to a Passaic County clerkship blocked by the senate president, delaying his run to the plum post by a year. Sweeney saw his own fingerprints on Currie when the establishment resolved a 2013 Jason O’Donnell versus Ray Lesniak fight for the state party chairmanship by catapulting Currie into he seat as a compromise choice.

Sweeney took some credit for that, and was subsequently stunned – and hurt – when Currie bucked him as a statewide candidate – and lynch pinned the northern chairs for Murphy. Currie’s and Murphy’s silence while the NJEA shoveled $5 million into LD3 in support of a Trump and guns-backing Republican alternative angered Sweeney. Then the Murphy Campaign – apparently stumbling into giving the thumbs up signal to $1.3 billion in new revenues and the candidate’s declaration that he would turn new Jersey into a sanctuary state sooner than kowtow to President Donald J. Trump – dropped another anvil on the suburban Sweeney’s back, making his reelection more difficult than ever and causing Sweeney’s allies to wonder about Murphy’s designs on governing.

Ironically, Sweeney is already beginning to resemble the man he replaced for the senate presidency, Senator Dick Codey (D-27), who resented millionaire Jon Corzine stepping over him for the governorship in 2005. Codey, the source conceded, hardly minded reminded people from his bobble-headed doll saddled throne in the senate, what they missed by opting for Corzine over himself in the front office. But the case appears exacerbated in the case of Murphy and Sweeney owing to the even greater divide put between the two men by the case the teacher’s organization made on behalf of Murphy and against Sweeney, against the backdrop of the state’s thorniest budget issue: public pensions and benefits.