It didn't take long for Victor Lopez to flex his muscles in his political comeback.

Two months after Lopez won a seat on the Orange Cove City Council, the city's police chief, Frank Steenport, was suspended without official explanation.

There's a saying about debates that goes like this: When you have the facts on your side, you present facts; when logic is on your side, you present logic; and when you don't have facts or logic on your side, you pound the table.

Or, as adapted by Lopez, you challenge people to boxing matches and refer to yourself in the third person, as Lopez did in an interview with The Bee's John Ellis.

"He's the one that's worried, not Victor Lopez," Lopez said of Steenport. "He's the one that's got the problem, not Victor Lopez. ... Give him a handkerchief, man. When big boys cry like that."

Steenport is paying the price for trying to clean up Orange Cove, which Lopez ruled with iron fists as mayor from 1986 through 2010 when voters finally dethroned him.

But Steenport also set up the showdown against Lopez by writing in a department memo after the election: "It is with the greatest possible regret that as of the last count from the County Election Board it appears that Victor Lopez and his fellow candidates ... will now have the majority on the City Council and control all aspects of City policy and government."

Steenport also predicted in the memo that Lopez and his allies would "come after me" and that Lopez would "slowly and deliberately destroy" the police department.

Clearly, the police chief isn't a guy willing to play ball with Lopez and those under his thumb. Steenport is represented by a lawyer, and a court may eventually decide if Steenport's memo qualifies as insubordination and if his department's failure to stay within budget justified his suspension.

But there's no doubt that voters deserve what they get and, after two years with Lopez out of power, enough voters yearned for his dictatorial leadership to bring him back.

Orange Cove has a mayor and a city manager, but no one should be fooled into thinking that Lopez isn't calling the shots. You needn't get into a boxing ring with Lopez and his huge ego to recognize that.