Here’s what you missed while Mayor Bloomberg was running for a third term – because he kept it under wraps until after the ballots were counted:

•The city budget deficit isn’t as bad as he said.

•The NYPD was quietly exempted from the budget cuts at almost every other agency.

•A $60 million tax loss that gave Bloomberg a soap box to rail against the state Senate has magically vanished.

But that’s all just numbers. What really drives the point home is the photo of Bloomberg and Sarah Palin hanging around in City Hall.

The picture – and six others – was shot Oct. 10, 2007, when the then-governor of Alaska was on a visit to New York.

Bloomberg hosts visiting pols all the time for short meet-and-greets, and nobody knew at the time that, a year later, Palin would become a controversial Republican icon.

The photos might have been inconvenient for Bloomberg while he was running against Democrat Bill Thompson in a heavily Democratic city, but they belong to the taxpayers.

The Daily News asked for copies of the photographs July 8. Under the state Freedom of Information Law, Bloomberg’s lawyer Anthony Crowell had to respond within five days.

He handed them over two weeks after the election.

“There is simply no good reason for delaying disclosure,” said the state’s top public records watchdog, Robert Freeman, of the Committee on Open Government. “Embarrassment is not one of the grounds.”

(Source: NY Daily News)