Gov. Josh Green announced Thursday he’s canceling a long-planned trip to Washington, D.C., because “in light of recent events and to ensure steady leadership for our state during this time” he can’t leave.

Think about that for a minute.

What he’s essentially saying is this thing with Lt. Gov. Sylvia Luke is so bad that at best it would look terrible if he handed over state government to a person under such a big black cloud of public mistrust. At worst he’s saying she can’t be trusted to run the state.

“As I’ve previously stated, regarding the investigation, accountability is essential — no one gets a free pass,” the governor said in a press release.

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So until the investigation clears Luke, or it doesn’t and she resigns — which to be honest is looking more likely — the governor is stuck here at home. This trip was to the National Governors Association conference but Green also planned to use the time to meet with Trump administration officials and others at a time when the feds are stripping money away from Hawaiʻi, funds the state can’t afford to lose.

What’s happening now is unprecedented, at least in the collective memory of people who have been in Hawaiʻi and followed government for decades. No one I talked to could remember another of the state’s governors feeling like it would be wrong to leave the LG in charge for a short time.

Green has good reason to worry, though. Luke appears to be in real political trouble.

She admits she took $10,000 from a campaign donor and never reported it as required by law. Only after being asked about it four years later by Civil Beat did she finally amend her campaign finance report to reflect she took the money, which she had quickly given back. And all this is coming in the midst of an FBI investigation into a mysterious legislator who the government says took $35,000 from a suspected briber. Luke concedes she could be the legislator they are looking at, but denies she took $35,000. Her public statements are very confusing and, as a result, sound suspicious.

That Green felt the need to publicly confirm he’s not going anywhere is almost certainly his own political play, an effort to distance himself from a lieutenant governor he’s not always been that comfortable with but who he was about to join forces with in a bid for reelection.

In the past few days, many people have mistakenly criticized the governor for picking a bad running mate four years ago, even calling on him to fire her. But that’s not how it works in Hawaiʻi.

The lieutenant governor runs separately in the primary and then the winner automatically joins the governor on the party ticket for the general election. The gubernatorial candidate has no say in who the lieutenant governor candidate is, in other words. That is decided by the voters.

Think of it as the political equivalent of a shotgun wedding.

In 2022, Luke beat out a field that included three other solid Democrat contenders to win the primary with 33.7% of the vote. Ikaika Anderson got 25.9%, Keith Amemiya 21.9% and Sherry Menor-McNamara 9.7%.

Luke and Green were elected overwhelmingly in November with 62.2% of the vote. The GOP ticket of Duke Aiona and Seaula Jr. Tupai received 36.3%.

During the run-up to the general and in the early days of the Green administration, questions were raised over whether the two would make an effective team. Although they’d known each other for years — Green was in the House with Luke before he jumped to the Senate — they weren’t really on the same wavelength.

In fact, the politically powerful Super PAC, Be Change Now, an offshoot of the Carpenters Union, spent more than $3 million trying to defeat Luke in the primary while spending millions supporting Green’s bid for reelection against Kai Kahele and Vicky Cayetano.

Once in office, the two seemed to settle in together, after a fashion. With Green’s blessing, Luke took on preschool expansion and bolstering the state’s broadband initiative as two areas she could make her own. In their first year, Green helped her out of a jam after she overspent her office budget, providing the money she needed to pay staff.

Both Green and Luke have begun raising money for their expected reelections and neither has drawn a challenger for the Aug. 8 primary. Until the recent revelations about Luke, both of them were considered shoo-ins. Their primaries would again be separate and they again would be joined together for the general election.

Now things have changed. Dramatically. Luke may not even have a path forward to reelection, let alone a political life.

Green has been pushing his attorney general to wrap up her investigation of the $35,000 money exchange by spring. Some insiders think the whole situation could come to a head in just a few weeks.

Many members of the public have started calling on Luke to resign and that’s a likely outcome just based on the apparent campaign spending violations. If she’s tied to the bribery suspect who the FBI recorded while at a meeting with convicted former Rep. Ty Cullen handing over $35,000 to the unidentified legislator, things would get worse for her. The attorney general by now should know the identity of the legislator since the AG’s office has been getting files on the case from the FBI.

If she doesn’t resign, the Hawaiʻi Constitution sets out the rules to remove an elected official from office through impeachment. The House would need a majority of members to vote to impeach and then the trial would move to the Senate, which would need two-thirds of its members to vote to impeach.

Under Hawaiʻi law, the order of succession beneath the lieutenant governor begins with the Senate president, followed by the speaker of the House and the state attorney general. If all three of them decline the office, the law says, the job opportunity passes to “the director of finance, the comptroller, the director of taxation, and the director of human resources development in the order named.”

Handing off the LG job to a top state official isn’t unprecedented and that’s happened fairly recently. In 2018, as Gov. David Ige was facing a tough reelection bid, Lt. Gov. Shan Tsutsui stepped down to join a political strategy firm. Attorney General Doug Chin took the post after both the Senate president and House speaker declined.