Retirement doesn’t suit former Gov. Paul LePage. Though he’s twice moved to Florida since leaving the Blaine House in 2018, he just won’t stay there.

In 2022, he came back to Maine to challenge the reelection bid of his successor, Gov. Janet Mills. It didn’t go well. Mills clobbered him, securing 55% of the vote in a three-way contest while LePage got 42%. In the aftermath, LePage headed south again to his Ormond Beach retirement place.

But on Sunday, he filed paperwork indicating his intention to run for, of all things, Congress. LePage is taking aim at U.S. Rep. Jared Golden, the Lewiston Democrat who has held sway in the sprawling 2nd District since he knocked incumbent Republican Bruce Poliquin out of office in 2018.

To put it mildly, LePage is not the sort of guy who thrives on Capitol Hill, something he once understood. When he knocked down rumors that he might run in the 2018 U.S. Senate race, LePage insisted, “A man has to know his limitations. And I’m a doer. The Senate does nothing.” If he thinks the Senate does nothing, he ought to examine the House, where it’s considered a major accomplishment merely to elect its own leader.

The LePage of days past said that being in Congress would entail too many boring committee meetings, which is probably true. Then he said something that showed a keen awareness of his strengths and weaknesses. LePage admitted that he “wouldn’t make a very good legislator.” That was almost a decade ago.

Now, the man is 76 years old. On Election Day in 2026, he’ll be 78. Only once in the history of the country has someone older than LePage won for the first time a seat in the U.S. House: an Illinois congressman elected in 1952.

There have been 12,582 people who have served in the House who were younger than LePage when they won their office, according to the House Office of the Historian. Golden is 42. He’ll be 44 on Election Day next year.

It’s telling that if you add together Golden’s age and the age of the Republican he barely beat last year, 31-year-old Austin Theriault of Fort Kent, their combined age is less than LePage’s.

But it’s not that he’s old that matters. It’s not even that he used to recognize how poorly suited he would be for the job. It’s that LePage has shown what amounts to contempt for his home state.

Moving away once was understandable. Lots of Mainers head south in their retirement years to escape the dangers, cost and isolation of our long winters. But when he came back again in 2022, it wasn’t because he realized that, hey, Maine is great. He simply wanted to regain the Blaine House. When LePage fell short, he immediately headed back to Florida. He registered to vote there again.

LePage has spent much more time in Florida since 2018 than he has in Maine. The bottom line is that he’s one of them now, not one of us.

They just had a special election on April 1 to pick a new U.S. House member to represent Ormond Beach. If LePage wanted to go to Washington, D.C., so much, he should have jumped into the race in that safe Republican district he’s chosen instead of heading north once more.

Maine has too many needs to waste one of its two congressional seats. The Maine GOP gave LePage a free pass in 2022. Surely it won’t do the same next year when it has a handful of contenders who deserve it more than an old, out-of-touch Florida man.