Well, it doesn’t look like they’re going to take my advice on former East Brunswick Councilman Richard Walling. Regular readers may remember that a while back, shortly after Walling was charged with stealing more than $40,000 from the nonprofit Friends of Monmouth Battlefield, I suggested it might be nice to consider some historically appropriate sentencing. A punishment that might have been meted out in 1776, if someone had done the same thing.

Like hanging. Or the pillory. The stocks. A ducking stool. Or the ever popular whipping post. I proposed that the punishment be carried out in public. Unfor-tunately, none of that is likely to happen.

Last week, Walling pleaded guilty to third-degree theft (a forgery charge was dropped as part of the plea bargain), and must serve five years probation and pay restitution to the group of $32,500.

Considering the fact that Walling originally faced a maximum prison term of five years and a $15,000 fine on each of the two counts he was first charged with, we’re left with only one conclusion: He got off easy.

The same way he got off easy the year before when he pleaded guilty to a disorderly conduct charge after being accused of harassing a 17-year-old student in the school where he taught. About the only lasting punishment he faced from that mess was losing his teaching license and giving up his job at Middlesex County Vocational and Technical High School in East Brunswick.

I don’t know precisely what this says about our justice system, but if you can steal that much money from a wonderful nonprofit like the Friends and not spend a single night behind bars, it looks like the message we’re sending is: If you’re gonna go into thievery, you’re better off stealing a lot of money than trying to sneak out of the grocery store with a cart full of food for your hungry kids.

Steal the food, and you’ll probably wind up in the slam, at least for a few hours. If you’ve got enough steaks and other expensive stuff in that cart, it might push the offense into the felony zone, and then you’re looking at real time in the hoosegow.

Steal $32,500, and you have the inconvenience of checking in with a pesky probation officer for five years. Which sounds like the better alternative?

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Speaking of confessed criminals: It was great to see former West Long Branch Mayor Paul Zambrano admit to accepting $15,000 in bribes from an FBI informant to help the informant get public contracts. Although he hasn’t been sentenced yet, the conviction carries a maximum penalty of 20 years in jail and a fine of $250,000.

Considering the leniency our courts seem to grant as a matter of course to felonious public officials, it’s doubtful Zam-brano will get the max, but I’ll bet he gets more than Walling did for flat-out stealing.

At his hearing, Zambrano was looking good. His photo in the paper suggests he’s lost a lot of weight since his arrest, and he was apparently joking around with the prosecutors.

But you’ve got to figure that since Zambrano implicated an unnamed West Long Branch councilman and an unnamed official in another community during the hearing, there are at least two more people in Monmouth County today who are anxiously awaiting the arrival of FBI cars in their driveways.

And you’ve also got to wonder what our friend John Merla, the mayor of Keyport, was thinking as he read about Zambrano’s guilty plea.

Unlike most of the other officials arrested and indicted for bribery and other assorted crimes this year in Monmouth County, Merla — who was arrested Feb. 22 and charged with accepting $11,500 in cash in return for public contracts, part of the money the FBI complaint says he used as a down payment on a new Dodge Durango — has bunkered up and refused to go away. That approached worked for him in 1993 when he faced bribery charges, after all, and he eventually beat the rap.

Over in Hazlet, Mayor Paul Coughlin, who was only accused of taking $3,000, resigned his position almost immediately.

Merla said, no way. Not only did he refuse to resign as mayor, he straightaway appeared on the dais, not to apologize to residents for any wrongdoing, but to apologize for the recent media attack on him and his good name. Anywhere else in the world, that nonsense would have been laughable.

Nobody laughed in Keyport, however, and the community closed ranks in support of its beleaguered mayor. Nobody called for his resignation or questioned whether he could continue serving with such an ugly cloud overhead. Merla just chugs along, acting in public as if the possibility of jail time is just another walk in the park.

But privately, you’ve got to wonder whether he doesn’t look at the recent guilty pleas coming out of Operation Bid Rig and wonder if he might be taking the wrong tack. That maybe it might be better to cop a plea than risk making the feds really mad and taking the full fall.

That’s what I’d be thinking about if I was John Merla. But then again, I’m not John Merla. He beat a bribery rap once. Why not twice? And even if they make the charges stick, he can always blame the press.

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In Manalapan, where they’ve just adopted an ordinance restricting where people convicted of sex offenses can live, a draft map of the restricted zones makes it look like the only places in town convicted offenders are welcome will be parts of the Covered Bridge adult community, the area out by Oakland Mills and Thompson Grove roads, and the New Beginnings housing development just outside English-town.

Curiously, part of the Alexandria Drive neighborhood off Symmes Drive, where Kevin Aquino lived when he murdered Amanda Wengert in 1994, is not in a restricted zone.

In Freehold Township, where they’ve adopted a similar ordinance, our reading of the map suggests convicted offenders will only be allowed to live in a small area around West Main Street and on Gravel Hill Road, where some very expensive homes were recently constructed.

Or they can move to Freehold Borough. That town is still wide open.

Gregory Bean is executive editor of Greater Media Newspapers.