Fresh off confessing their schoolgirl crush on the Lightworker, the Seattle Times editorial staff admits that the Washington Republicans *GASP* have been right all along about the $3.2 billion state budget deficit:

The governor blamed the shortfall on the disaster in Wall Street and, by implication, on the Bush administration. That was not altogether convincing. Whatever the cause of the Wall Street crisis -- and we think most of the blame is in the private sector -- some kind of economic downturn would have happened eventually, and Gregoire's budget was not ready for it.

Ever since she took office in 2005, the governor has offered an aggressive budget that assumed good times would continue.

Last November, the state's next-biennium revenue forecast fell by more than $100 million for the first time in four years. At the time, we said it was a signal of bad times -- that historically, when revenue forecasts have started to fall, they have tended to keep falling. The Republicans also said so, and on this matter they were right. Gregoire wasn't convinced. She argued that the economy had come to the rescue of her budget before and it might again.

Now she is convinced. That is good, but the projected deficit is now $3.2 billion, nearly 10 percent of the total, and is almost sure to be deeper by January.

Gregoire's truthiness about the budget deficit, I predict, costs her the Times endorsement and those of many other editoral boards around the state.