In the end, he betrayed his name.

He called himself the Humble Farmer. He was an almost three-decade fixture on Maine Public Radio's airwaves, where his mixture of vintage jazz and quirky commentary attracted listeners by the thousands.

But something happened a little while ago. The music stayed the same, while the commentaries -- usually focused on his wife, Marsha, "the almost perfect woman," or aspects of rural Maine life -- began to stray into the political. Between the jazz grooves, we got political rants -- against the president, certain Maine voters, ideas he didn't like. And when the management at MPBN got gun shy and said, "Stop that!" we learned that Humble was perhaps not so humble.

This week, MPBN announced that Robert Skoglund of St. George, aka the Humble Farmer, would no longer produce his radio program for the network. That announcement followed a decidedly un-humble campaign of eight months or so, in which Skoglund marshaled his supporters to fight what he called the "censorship" of his political views.

Here's the thing: We listened to Skoglund for the music and put up with the commentaries as the price of the jazz. We're all for the First Amendment, being a newspaper, but we're also all for being able to edit what our commentators send us. If the garden guy starts holding forth on international politics, we're going to ask for a rewrite.

We're sorry to see the Humble Farmer go. But ultimately, his ego got the better of him. We always thought it was redundant to call someone the Humble Farmer -- here in Maine, that's implicit. We hope Skoglund and MPBN reconsider their separation, set aside their pride and egos and remember the mission of public broadcasting: To serve the public, not individuals or institutions. That jazz was awfully good. We're going to miss it.