This means war? N.C. politician quits council seat in Klingon-language letter

A North Carolina politician has chosen a memorable way to step down from his Town Council seat, an event notable less for what he said than for how he said it: The resignation was submitted in Klingon.

David Waddell, a councilman in Indian Trail, a town in Union County a few miles from Charlotte, invoked the language of the war-making race from "Star Trek" in saying he wouldn't serve out his first term. According to a report in the Charlotte Observer, Waddell provided the Klingon-language letter to Mayor Michael Alvarez "as an inside joke."

"Folks don’t know what to think of me half the time," he told the paper. "I might as well have one last laugh."

Below is a screenshot of the letter, posted on Waddell's Facebook page:



In order to make it accessible to those not fluent in Klingon, he included a translation of the resignation. It read:

"Teach (the) city (the) constitution / I will return next time to (witness) victory. / Resignation occurs in 2014 the 31st of January. Perhaps today is a good day (to) resign."

Alvarez, however, wasn't amused, the paper said. "It's an embarrassment for Indian Trail, and it's an embarrassment for North Carolina," the town's mayor was quoted as saying.

Waddell did post a lengthier, non-Klingon explanation on his Facebook page detailing why he was leaving the council.

"The past year on the Indian Trail Town Council was filled with more deception, conflict of interest issues, being left in the dark on what’s going on, crony capitalism, runaway development and requests for public information being refused or stonewalled for months," he wrote.

His seat, the Observer reported, was set to end in December 2015. His last day in office will be at the end of this month.

Waddell doesn't appear entirely finished yet with elected office though. In the longer letter he wrote, he said he's going to make a bid for the U.S. Senate as a write-in candidate with the Constitution Party. It isn't known how many members of the nation's Senate speak Klingon.