It’s no wonder Mayor Richard M. Daley suffers from high blood pressure, given the Confederacy of Dunces that surrounds him.

Last month, for example, the mayor’s deputy chief of staff, Terry Teele, was forced to resign after admitting he accepted $3,000 from clout-heavy developer Oscar D’Angelo to remodel his kitchen and took out another low-interest loan for his brother. Three thousand bucks. On the dumbness scale, this one buried the needle. And sure enough, the next thing we heard was that D’Angelo had used his clout to win a lucrative contract for a bookseller at O’Hare International Airport.

Stuff like that is always happening to Daley. Some people know some other people, and suddenly they’re the city’s exclusive purveyor of wrought iron. A minority-owned firm turns out to be run by white people with ties to the administration. With or without his knowledge, somebody is always trading on the Daley name and then doing something really stupid to get caught.

Clearly, the man doesn’t need this kind of aggravation. Thankfully, Daley is back at work and feeling better, with medication to lower his blood pressure and doctors’ orders to relax a bit more. But they should have written the mayor a much stronger prescription: Lose the Dunces.

Maybe this is what happens when there’s nothing left to win. Daley took over the schools with the help of the state Republicans and got the Chicago Housing Authority back from the feds. Almost half of the City Council members are Daley appointees, and the mayor captured close to half of the black vote in his last election. Where’s the fun?

Running everything doesn’t always mean you’re running it well. People get sloppy. They get arrogant. And they start believing they can do whatever they want. Look at the Dunces who operate Daley’s political organization. In an otherwise ho-hum primary election on March 21, the fabled Democratic Machine managed to lose one of the few contests that may have mattered --- the race for clerk of the Circuit Court of Cook County. Instead of embracing Dorothy Brown, an African American who nearly defeated Daley nemesis Miriam Santos for city treasurer last year, the organization ran one of its many party hacks, Alderman Pat Levar of the 45th Ward. Pat Levar? Is this the best the organization can do?

Some people are groomed for higher office. Others should get down on their knees every day and thank God they have a city job and no one is raising a fuss about it. But when Levar’s miserable campaign didn’t give them enough to do, the party bosses decided to embarrass themselves even further by supporting 47th Ward Alderman Eugene Shulter’s bid to knock off his longtime mentor, Committeeman Edmund Kelly.

Now let me get this straight. The organization spent a lot of political capital to topple a 75-year-old man who holds a nonpaying post that no longer wields any real power. And lost.

Committeemen once had jobs to dole out, and they collected political IOUs throughout the year and cashed them in for votes on Election Day. Kelly himself once sat at the top of the patronage heap, as a powerful committeeman and as general superintendent of the Chicago Park District. These days, there aren’t many jobs left to give, though 47th Ward volunteers said that didn’t stop Schulter from promising a lucrative position to every stiff who walked through his office door. Poor guy. He must have thought he was running for secretary of state.

These political follies were brought to you courtesy of Tommy Lyons, committeeman of the 45th Ward and Pat Levar’s keeper. And despite the embarrassing defeats, the party bosses circled the wagons last month and re-elected Lyons as chairman of the Cook County Democratic Central Committee, the Politburo of the Machine.

When Harold Washington won the mayor’s race in 1983, he boldly proclaimed the Machine to be dead and buried. But now we know that Harold was wrong. The Machine isn’t dead. It’s irrelevant. If I were Al Gore, that would make me very nervous. Gore needs a huge push from the Chicago organization to offset Republican votes elsewhere in the state and carry Illinois in the November presidential election. But the way it looks now, the Machine can’t carry a tune, much less the vice president.

All of which won’t help the mayoral blood pressure. Daley’s arteries are fine. It’s his party that needs a good cleaning out.