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It is over.

After four years of frayed nerves and overcooked rhetoric, long-embattled City Manager Mitchell Johnson is down if not completely out. The City Council voted 5-4 Tuesday night to remove Johnson from his post but he will remain employed in an unspecified city job until July 15.

In the end, the rancorous division on the council over Johnson’s performance kept getting in the way of city business, posing a distraction that was at times paralyzing. Tuesday’s vote marked the fourth time council members had moved that Johnson be fired or demoted. That wasn’t all.

Johnson’s seat on the council dais had been removed.

At various times some council members sought to lessen his power by having the police chief and city attorney report directly to the council instead of to the city manager.

Those efforts did not succeed, but they underscored sharp divisions on the council, and in the community, that would not go away.

Foremost, Johnson has remained at the center of the controversy over the resignation, in 2006, of former Police Chief David Wray. Depending on whom you ask, Johnson is a good and decent man who did the best he could under very difficult circumstances — or a child of the devil.

The truth is, Johnson made some mistakes in how he handled the Wray case but rampaging mythologies about vast conspiracies appear more fanciful than factual.

The bottom line: Johnson lost confidence in Wray, in whose hiring he played a major role. Now the City Council has lost confidence in Johnson.

The council is not without its share of culpability in this saga.

It did not manage the manager very well. It repeatedly failed to give him clear goals and measures by which his effectiveness could have been evaluated objectively — without being contaminated by personal and political agendas.

So it simply boiled down to a matter of who wanted Johnson to stay and who didn’t.

At some point, however, this saga needed to end. Even council members who had been at odds over Johnson’s future agreed.

“We needed a fresh start,” Johnson critic Mike Barber said.

“We need to move forward; we need to heal,” said Zack Matheny, who had supported Johnson until changing his vote Tuesday night.

There are too many pressing issues to confront not to move on: a teetering economy, the city budget, a new manager to hire.

Meanwhile, the ranks of top managers in city government are frightfully thin: four department head positions are open, as are two assistant city managers’ positions.

Now that this has been resolved, the council needs to get on with the business of leading the city. Or the voters may decide to make changes of their own in the fall election.