I NEVER expected to say it, but Darren Dopp is getting a bum rap.

Based on my experience covering Dopp and his longtime boss, Eliot Spitzer, last week’s report from the state Commission on Public Integrity just seems absurd.

The report basically said that four ex-Spitzer officials, including Dopp, acted alone without much input or guidance from the governor in the Troopergate or Dirty Tricks Scandal. Spitzer, says the commission, was only tangentially aware of the details of the plan to smear then-Senate Majority Leader Joe Bruno.

It’s hard to feel sorry for Dopp if even half the charges in the report are true. (He’s contesting the findings.) At the very least, he was a political hit man masquerading as a public servant – digging up (or producing) dirt on Bruno while getting paid by the taxpayers, not Spitzer’s campaign office.

Yet, in the days when Spitzer was attorney general, there were few if any buffers between him and Dopp – especially when it came to digging up dirt on enemies. The concept that Dopp did anything without Spitzer’s approval is about as insane to me as Spitzer’s image as a reformist governor.

How can I be so sure? Let’s go back several years, to when an editor of mine at Newsweek called me to her office to discuss an important matter. Dopp, chief spokesman for then-AG Spitzer, had accused me of some bad stuff. I’d written an unflattering article on Spitzer’s fund-raising practices, and Dopp in essence said I was a liar, a bully and an unethical journalist using Newsweek to smear his boss.

He said I’d verbally abused Spitzer during an interview, made up a quote and purposely conjured up a story out of thin air to attack possibly the most powerful (and, in Dopp’s view, the most ethical) law-enforcement official in America. I needed to be stopped, he said – or, at the very least, taken off the Spitzer beat.

“Sorry I have to ask,” the editor said: “Is any of this true?”

No, I answered, and she said she’d thought as much – the charges were so over the top, so insane, that only a wayward, unhinged flack could make up such nonsense.

Well, not quite. Later, I was asked to see a more senior Newsweek editor. He’d gotten a similar call – but from Spitzer himself. The AG vented about my reporting, then quizzed him about my sources, including whether it was one of his targets, former New York Stock Exchange board member Ken Langone. (Langone’s since been cleared of any improprieties.)

The editor told me that Spitzer was angry not just because we wouldn’t reveal our source. Both he and Dopp were ticked off that we’d reported on Spitzer just as we would any other politician who raises campaign cash from people who have something to gain from giving.

Spitzer was running for governor as the reform candidate – an image crafted in large part by Dopp, his main liaison with the press.

Dopp had done a great job. Spitzer was heavily favored to win, having already won the hearts and minds of most reporters as “the enforcer” who took on Wall Street crime and who brought people like Dick Grasso and Ken Langone to justice. In reality, though, he was a politician who’d do whatever it took to win – even if it was unleashing Dopp on a reporter, then following up with some arm-twisting on his own.

The point of this tale, of course, is to show how closely Spitzer and Dopp worked together when they needed to get things done, politically.

I’ve covered the man and his actions on many, many occasions. And I’ve never seen a lone wolf or rogue agent in Spitzerland. Only willing surrogates, looking to carry out orders – whether handed down explicitly, or simply assumed, because they knew so well what their boss wanted that they didn’t need his formal approval.

Spitzer, of course, is far from the first politician to go after his enemies. Normally, however, there are buffers between the elected official and those doing the dirty work. In the end, Richard Nixon had to resign mainly for the coverup, not the crime.

But what was striking about Spitzerland was the seeming lack of buffers – just orders, direct or indirect, from the top to staffers that they needed to win almost at all costs, no matter how sleazy the tactic or even how false the accusation.

Case in point: When Spitzer targeted Grasso over his $140 million pay package, it was Dopp who first told me Grasso was having an affair – while Spitzer sat by not even raising an eyebrow.

And soon Spitzer unleashed his lead attorney on the case, Avi Schick, to “investigate” Grasso’s extramarital sex life. Soon, the accusation that Grasso had a love child became a prominent part of Spitzer’s taxpayer-funded investigation of the former NYSE chief’s compensation.

Grasso vehemently denied all the sexual allegations, and evidence supporting them is scant, at best. But that didn’t stop Spitzer from “probing” or Dopp from telling me that Grasso was “boning” his secretary.

Grasso was hardly the only target to get the Spitzer-Dopp treatment. Hank Greenberg once told me that he hates Dopp as much as Spitzer for what he believes were leaks from Spitzer’s probe of accounting practices at insurance giant AIG, which ultimately forced Greenberg out as CEO. The list goes on and on.

Yet the Commission on Public Integrity somehow ignored all this history. If this august body had anything but an obvious political agenda to whitewash the truth about Spitzer’s brand of politicking, it would have done some reporting and have learned the following:

During Spitzer’s time as AG, his targets constantly complained about leaks coming from the Dopp-led press office. Some leaks were real, some imagined. But under normal circumstances, complaints from high-level attorneys representing high-powered clients usually have their intended result: The leaks end.

Not with Spitzer and Dopp – the dirt just kept on coming from the best political tag team I’ve ever seen in action.

Charles Gasparino is on-air editor at CNBC and author of “King of the Club: Richard Grasso and the Survival of the New York Stock Exchange.”