Lt. Brian Cardamone, chief of staff at the Worcester County Sheriff’s Office, has had his say, and that is the end of it.

No amount of story-bending or tale-twisting regarding last December’s burglary of an Ocean Pines Police Department storage shed and the aftermath of that event will change the facts as he laid them out in an interview this week.

That shed, which ought to be replaced with something more secure, did contain case evidence. Further, the leadership and other members of the department knew that, or at least became aware of it during the post-burglary transfer of property from the shed to a cell in the department’s lockup.

Included in that property were numerous firearms, including handguns and shotguns (which should have been stored in some less accessible location) and not odds and ends such as light bars and other harmless department materiel, as was claimed in a recent Ocean Pines podcast.

Further, the sheriff’s office’s investigation of the break-in, led by Cardamone during his brief stint as the department’s acting police chief, did result in the discovery of other breaches of standard police policy and procedures by department personnel.

To be clear, the break-in itself is being treated as a separate incident and remains under investigation, while the other problems within the community police force seem to be the result of laissez-faire management.

In other words, departmental leadership failed to observe the strict standards expected of any law enforcement agency and was held accountable for it.

Essentially, Cardamone entered the situation to look into the department’s handling of the shed break-in and found a big and mostly unrelated mess that he and Ocean Pines Association management agreed had to be addressed.

Suggestions and assertions that his actions weren’t warranted, or were somehow unfair, are unfair and irresponsible themselves … because they simply aren’t true.