With less than a month left in his tenure, the countdown clock to the end of Mayor Richard M. Daley’s tenure as Chicago’s sultan is ticking.

Here at Chicago Journal, we’ll miss him.

Yes, I know that’s not the kind of statement you often expect to read in the news media that has so often clashed with Hizzoner, but we have a good reason. Really. We swear.

It’s because he’s so candid, and so unpredictable.

In an era of politicians who speak every word through the filter of 5,000 press reps, rarely — if ever — saying anything that could be construed as offensive to anyone, Daley was a gem.

He was bombastic. He was overly excitable. But most importantly, he was frank.

You could always expect to hear what the mayor really meant when he started speaking, especially when he strayed from his scripted announcements, moving from his halting, stammered delivery to his off-the-cuff stream of consciousness rants.

If he happened to address the topic you were writing about, it was a goldmine.

This was on full display Monday morning. Ostensibly a groundbreaking for the forthcoming 12th District police station, it quickly became clear that the event was more about the mayor’s legacy. (The massive “Thank you Mayor Daley!” banner may have given that away.)

The mayor spoke first, and he didn’t stay on topic long, hitting on a host of issues around Chicago Journal’s coverage area in his 15-minute rant.

Here, for your reading pleasure, are a couple of choice nuggets from the Mayor’s speech:

“We fought six years for Walmart, and everybody loves Walmart now. I don’t get it. They built ’em all in the suburbs. We’re building one at Presidential Towers, no one says anything! They’re all the opposition, ‘Oh it’s unfair, everything else, they’re the worst,’ all of a sudden you get all these other stores, no one says anything.

“All the aldermen … now they all want ’em. It’s like, you know, they want ice cream, and they want it bad, they want it right away, and so it’s really kind of sad.”

“I think everybody should be a public servant. No one should be an entitled servant. You serve the public — serve the public. The public are the taxpayers. We work for you, we’re employees of the public. We have to get that back in state, county and city government, that we work for you. We don’t work for somebody else. We don’t work for a party, we don’t work for philosophy, we don’t work for a union, we don’t work for an association.”

Happy trails, Mayor.