Third Ward City Councilman Rickey King may not technically be required to surrender his city council seat yet, but that doesn't mean he shouldn't.

As The Daily Advance recently reported, King pleaded guilty to a felony forgery charge in Chesapeake, Va., earlier this month, a charge that stemmed from his signing his estranged wife's name to a vehicle transfer document. According to his plea, King admits using the forged document to trade in one vehicle and purchase another.

Under North Carolina law, the guilty plea will cost King his council seat. That's because convicted felons lose their right to vote, and if you can't vote you can't hold elected office.

Under ordinary circumstances, King already would have been required to give up his voting rights and thus his city council seat. However, because he hasn't been sentenced yet, he technically isn't considered a felon under Virginia law. At least not yet. King won't officially become a convicted felon until July 14 — the date set for his sentencing hearing.

The Commonwealth Attorney for Chesapeake who handled King's guilty plea, Nancy Parr, doesn't expect anything to change when King's sentencing hearing is finally held. King has pleaded guilty to a felony, and a judge has already found him guilty, Parr says. The only reason King wasn't sentenced on April 11, Parr says, was because he requested a pre-sentence report be prepared. Such reports give judges background information about defendants prior to sentencing.

For some reason, however, King and his attorney, Jon M. Babineau, have tried to portray the delayed sentencing as a second chance for King to avoid a felony conviction. Babineau told The Daily Advance he plans to ask the judge at the hearing to reduce King's felony guilty plea to a misdemeanor guilty plea. In effect, Babineau wants the judge to overrule the plea agreement he and King have already reached with prosecutors.

There are a couple of problems with this. First, neither Babineau nor King seems to be arguing that King is innocent of the crime he has pleaded guilty to. Nor do they appear to be arguing that King was under any undue pressure to make a plea deal he didn't want to make.

As best we can tell, the only thing King and his attorney are unhappy about — after the fact — is that King, a former police officer, is being saddled with a felony conviction. But of course that begs the question why King elected to plead guilty to a felony. If avoiding a felony conviction was paramount, King surely shouldn't have pleaded guilty to one. It therefore strains credulity to believe that a judge will in three months do what King, acting on his attorney's advice, failed to do on April 11: craft himself a better plea deal.

So if King is going to be sentenced in July as a felon, why should he hold on to a council seat he can't keep after then? Why not resign now and let the city begin moving forward from this very personal and — unfortunately — very public tragedy? Why allow any council decisions between now and July 14 to be tainted with the smear that at least one of the votes was cast by a soon-to-be-felon?

King's reluctance to give up his seat may be understandable. What isn't so easy to forgive are the easy ethics of council members who are encouraging him to stay in office. Asked why she supports allowing King to keep his seat for now but had no similar leniency for former 4th Ward Councilman Kirk Rivers, Mayor Pro Tem Jean Baker suggested the difference came down to personalities. "They're totally different circumstances, totally different people," Baker said. "Rickey tries to do the best job for the people of his ward, not just for himself."

We think that's a dangerous way to look at things. Being morally consistent and doing the right thing should never depend on who's involved. King could stop his friends on city council from embarrassing themselves further with these indefensible defenses by resigning now.