Just as New London has acquired a new millstone around the neck - a proposed schools superintendent who won't go away, despite a steady rolling out of allegations about inflated credentials and blatant plagiarism - another of the city's old burdens has reared her head again.

Really, it seems like the city will need to get out a very big hook to pull both Police Chief Margaret Ackley and superintendent candidate Terrence Carter off the New London stage.

We all might hope that Carter's local attorney, Bill McCoy, will convince his client that there is no likely settlement forthcoming when the city finally cuts the cord on hiring him. Surely there will be adequate legal justification for not signing a contract to hire him.

Indeed, given Carter's history of filing for personal bankruptcy, and the unlikely awarding of any legal settlement for someone who, so far, has not even denied the many examples of likely plagiarism on his superintendent application, we might suspect attorney McCoy won't entertain for long the prospect of working for free.

Whenever it finally ends, the Carter affair will have left a lot of egg on prominent faces, including that of City Councilor Erica Richardson, who prominently defended Carter even as the scandal roared into full flames, and state-appointed Special Master Steven Adamowski, who ignored some early signs of trouble, including, my favorite, the candidate's misspelling of superintendent in application material that was rife with grammatical and spelling mistakes.

There is less hope that the police chief's lawyer, Leon Rosenblatt of West Hartford, who has made a career out of representing beleaguered municipal managers and stirring the political pot in communities around the state, will steer his client quietly offstage.

Indeed, on Wednesday Rosenblatt filed a preposterous request for an injunction against city Mayor Daryl Finizio, asking a judge to make the mayor, among other things, treat the chief better, invite her to more meetings, give her his cellphone number.

Finizio, to his great credit, was right at the net when this soft serve came over, announcing Thursday that he is placing the chief on paid administrative leave while a number of complaints against her are investigated.

The mayor suggested that this action may be the beginning of an effort to fire the chief, a problematic course since there is a state law that sets up municipal police chiefs as an invincible class, requiring "just cause" to dismiss them.

Clearly Ackley and her lawyer have been counting on that "just cause" clause to let the chief do whatever she wants and extract money in a lawsuit against the city.

"While I have approached the issue of allegations into the Chief's conduct with great caution, as no police chief in the State of Connecticut has been fired pursuant to the just cause statutes, I will not allow fear of the unknown, or any frivolous filings by the chief, to deter me from doing my job," Finizio said in announcing the administrative leave.

I first suggested this in a column July 3, 2013: "Go ahead Mayor Finizio, fire the police chief."

I was among those who originally celebrated the appointment of Chief Ackley, before Finizio's election, when it seemed a local candidate, a woman, was a sound choice to move what had been a sometimes troubled department in the right direction.

But then the horrible reign began.

The centerpiece of the chief's failing the city was her prominent allegations against the city councilor whom she accused of harassing her and interfering with the police department.

At city expense, the charges were thoroughly investigated by a former Superior Court judge, a woman, who said they were essentially without merit. Still, Ackley is pursuing in her lawsuit a settlement based on those now discredited charges.

A similar investigation, also at great city expense, was conducted by a Hartford law firm back in 2004 when Ackley, then in the rank and file of the department, accused three officers of harassing her.

Again, no substance was found to the Ackley complaints.

There have been lots of unsettling morale problems within the department since Ackley has headed it, and her most recent banning of the police union's lawyer from police headquarters is one of the more glaring examples of her inability to manage. The police chief, with a gun, is afraid of the unarmed union lawyer?

You can also find lots of troubling instances of the way crime has been mishandled under Chief Ackley, including the night she stayed on at a City Council meeting to discuss her own possible severance agreement while police were still on the street investigating the shooting of an unarmed man by an officer.

Her worst offense, in my opinion, came in the wake of the fatal stabbing of Matthew Chew, an innocent young man attacked on a city street, when police said the crime was "drug related," even though they knew it was random and that the killers were unidentified and still on the loose.

Ackley made no effort to change that deceptive police characterization and failed to warn the public or return newsroom calls about the killing for days.

I wonder if a police chief anywhere in Connecticut has claimed as much overtime, comp time, sick leave, harassment damages or other compensation as Ackley.

It seems to be all that has ever motivated her in the job and is now driving her legal assault on the city and the mayor.

Let's hope the mayor keeps the big backbone he displayed Thursday and refuses any settlement.

No lawsuit is better than the arguments you might eventually present to a jury.

And any jury that ever hears a case from Carter or Ackley will certainly side with the city.

This is the opinion of David Collins.