I’ll just get this off my chest up front: U.S. Attorney General Jeff Sessions is a sorry excuse for a high-level federal law enforcement official.

The AG stood this week before a crowd of conservative high school students who began chanting “Lock her up!”, referencing the idiotic e-mail controversy that centers on former Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton.

Rather than do the right thing, which would have been to silence the crowd and remind them of the “rule of law” and “due process,” the AG chuckled nervously and repeated the chant from the podium. He then said something about “hearing that chant” during the 2016 presidential campaign.

I once was willing to give Sessions the benefit of the doubt, given his decision to recuse himself from the “Russia thing” probe at the Justice Department. No longer.

Sessions had the chance to show some statesmanship, to demonstrate that he lives by the rule of law. Instead, when the students began chanting “Lock her up!” he gravitated back to his partisan roots. He once was a Republican U.S. senator from Alabama who, before he was elected to that body, was rejected by the Senate for a federal judgeship because of racially tinged statements he had made.

Now the nation’s chief law enforcement officer has seen fit to continue the idiocy associated with a failed — and quite lengthy — investigation into a controversy that’s been decided.

The AG has joined the president of the United States in disgracing his high office.

Shameful.