He’s become the Fallin administration’s firefighter, so he might as well dress the part.

When $10 million mysteriously was missing at the state health department a few days ago, and officials started talking about layoffs, Gov. Mary Fallin sent in Doerflinger as the interim head of the department.

(A note to those who will try to use the Health Department problems as evidence that the state doesn’t have a revenue problem, but only suffers from waste, corruption and inefficiency: If we grant you the $10 million as a starting point, you only have $205 million more to explain in the current budget hole, $878 million in the one before that and $1.3 billion in the one before that.)

It makes sense to send Doerflinger to the Health Department. He has previously taken the helm of the Oklahoma Department of Human Services and has been Fallin’s point man on difficult budget negotiations for years.

He’s already taken charge at the health department, reportedly forcing out the agency’s chief lawyer. Health Commissioner Terry Cline and his top deputy previously had resigned.

Doerflinger’s record at DHS and the Office of Management and Enterprise Services have earned him some enemies. When you’re a firefighter, you run the risk of being scorched.

But our observation is that he has been a force for honest government, adequate funding of core state services and transparency.

We’ll look to Doerflinger to get the health department mess set right quickly, and hope that his voice isn’t lost in budget negotiations in the process. There’s plenty of knuckleheads in the state Capitol, and we need Doerflinger’s insistence on adequate revenue, structural fiscal sanity and truly balanced budgets.