Good riddance to Kristi Noem — who thought Homeland Security was about HER

Hooray to President Donald Trump for booting Kristi Noem from the Department of Homeland Security, a move that comes not a moment too soon.

She’d made it all too clear that she saw the job as being about serving herself and her image, not the president or the nation.

The final straw came Wednesday, when she flagrantly avoided answering a pointed question about her intimate relations with top subordinate Corey Lewandowski, a dodge clearly signaling an affair — at a hearing where she’d conspicuously been joined by her husband of 34 years.

And this followed her suggestion that Trump had signed off on awarding a week-old company owned by her associates with got $143 million in no-bid contracts to make ads promoting . . . her.

Hearing her defend her starring role — as a cowgirl, no less — in the DHS spots was bad enough, but then she said she “didn’t know” anything about the company in question before trying to hide behind her boss: What a twit.

Our desire to see her out was obvious when cheered in January as Trump sidelined Noem from ICE operations in Minnesota, which she’d fumbled horribly.

Not to disparage the hard work of federal agents on the ground, but it was obvious someone had ordered these officers to be far too aggressive in pursuing arrests and handling hostile activists interfering with their work.

As if that someone thought Homeland Security was about . . . playing cowboy.

The escalating tensions yielded the shooting deaths of Renee Good and Alex Pretti; driving home Noem’s responsibility for the mess was how quickly the situation calmed once Border Czar Tom Homan took over.

But the damage was done: Minneapolis fed the lefty line that Trump is waging a war on Latinos generally, risking GOP doom in the midterms.

Against that, Noem’s abusive attitude toward staff and other questionable choices may count only as distractions, but no Cabinet officers should be distracting from the president’s agenda.

Noem’s ouster is the first real second-term shakeup in Trump’s top team, which has generally worked remarkably smoothly; we expect Sen. Markwayne Mullin (R-Okla.) will meet that standard when he takes over at DHS — putting his country, not himself, first.