PASSAIC - On the day the Herald News endorses real estate developer Jose Sandoval  in the mayor’s race, four of the five candidates sit at the front of a big room hugging highway 21 at a warehouse district debate sponsored by an alliance of community groups.

A fifth chair stands empty.

“I had other commitments and I had to make those commitments,” Councilman Joe Garcia explains later.

Garcia’s absence at the last debate forum before Tuesday’s special election fans rumors that either one of the campaigns of Dr. Alex Blanco or city super Vinny Capuana broke through and secured backing from the councilman’s supporters, thereby shutting down his campaign.

Passaic County Republicans don’t need an internal war.  But they’ve got one.

The latest flare up between leadership factions in the party occurred last Monday, when freeholder candidates Mike Marotta and Jerry Holt held a joint beefsteak dinner fundraiser with Chairman Scott Rumana, who’s also an Assemblyman, at the Brownstone Restaurant in Paterson.

That led Rumana’s critics to charge that he was competing for resources with the cash-strapped freeholder candidates.  Rumana, in turn, said that his critics were holdovers from the dark days of the party and puppets of the man who used to control it: Peter Murphy.

Meanwhile, Marotta and Holt are stuck uncomfortably in the middle while they try to campaign against Democratic incumbents Bruce James and Greyson Hannigan.

The leading candidate to replace Assemblywoman Elease Evans on the Passaic County Board of Freeholders is Greyson Hannigan, a former Assistant Passaic County Counsel (Bill Pascrell III is the County Counsel).  Hannigan is an attorney who represented former Assemblyman Alfred Steele in his criminal case last year.