“Certainly it’s less than ideal, but it is what it is.”

Those words of “wisdom” came from U.S. Sen. Marco Rubio, the Florida Republican who once battled with Donald John Trump for his party’s presidential nomination.

He got involved in that juvenile and petulant verbal p****** match with the eventual GOP nominee and president.

So now that Trump has become entangled in what is looking more and more like a serious constitutional crisis, his former foe says “it is what it is”? That’s it?

Young man, it’s a lot worse than that!

What we have on our hands, Sen. Rubio, is a situation in which the president of the United States of America reportedly has asked the then-FBI director to back off an investigation of a former national security adviser.

Rubio is too young to remember an earlier constitutional crisis, but Richard Nixon did something quite similar regarding a break-in at the Watergate office and hotel complex. He had it on tape. The Senate got its hands on that tape and, well, that was all she wrote for President Nixon.

I am not about to predict a similar outcome for the current president, but as of this evening, it doesn’t look good.

Does this president have an inherent hatred for his enemies? Or is he just clueless about the consequences of his actions? I am going to give Trump the benefit of the doubt and presume that he just doesn’t know what the hell he’s doing as president of the United States.

Whatever the context or the circumstance, the Senate and the House of Representatives will need to hear from James Comey personally and will need to know precisely what he gleaned from the president’s “request” for him to drop the FBI probe of Michael Flynn.