Opinion: It’s ugly, but it’s done. That’s the best you can say about the state budget.

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Really?

Weeks of pocket-pickingly-expensive delays on a state budget, pink slips to state workers, ``closed`` signs on the doors of DMV offices --

Did it all come down to a beef about office furniture?

Not entirely. Republican state senator Abel Maldonado provided the last, staggering-over-the-finish-line vote to approve a big ugly California budget, but not until he got what he wanted:

* A ballot initiative to change the state Constitution so Californians will have open primaries. We’ve done it before, briefly, over the years; you can vote in the other political party’s election and vice versa. The voters like it; the major parties hate it.

* Dropping the 12-cent-per-gallon gas tax from the budget that was just approved. That leaves a $2 billion hole that’ll be replaced with an income tax bump, some fed money, and Schwarzenegger line-item vetoes.

* Another constitutional amendment to make sure legislators don’t get paid when the state budget’s in the red.

* And finally, the state won’t be paying the money it had already budgeted -- something like a million dollars -- for new furniture for the state controller’s suite of offices in the Capitol.

If we looked bad in the nation’s eyes before, we can’t look much better now that a budget has been achieved by yielding to the demands -- meritorious or not -- of a single legislator.

Voters do like open primaries, although the only thing both major parties may agree on is that they loathe them. Voters likewise think that if legislators don’t do their job, they shouldn’t be paid, but it would take changing the constitution to make that happen.

But all four of these are matters Maldonado can run on. He can run in his own fairly moderate district as a moderate Republican. Or, more enticingly and likely [because he’s ticked off his fellow Republicans by voting for tax hikes], he can run statewide as a reformer and budget-cutter. I can hear the ads now: ``I stopped a gas tax hike ... I made sure legislators don’t get paid if they don’t do their work.``

Maldonado ran for state controller in 2006 and lost in the primary to a more conservative candidate -- who went on to lose the general election to Democratic controller John Chiang. That’s practically become a formula in California politics.

Since then, the nearly seven-figure bill for new furniture for the controller’s expanded offices [furniture ordered long before] has never gotten unstuck from Maldonado’s craw.

The no-budget-no-pay amendment is something that should have been put forward a long time ago. But it’s dispiriting that it all happened in the dead of night, as part of a gory process that smelled in places like virtual payola for that one last vote to pass the budget.

I think you could call this a Pyrrhic victory. It’s named for an ancient king who beat the Romans, but at such a cost to his own forces that he supposedly said afterwards, ``Another such victory ... and we are undone.``

Second the motion.