Staffers at the state GOP will deliver an ultimatum to Party Chairman Ed Cox this weekend, telling him to fire Executive Director Tom Basile or they’ll walk, a source familiar with the plan confirmed.

“Nobody can work with Tom,” the source said. “We need to start rebuilding relationships here. Everybody knows he’s only out for himself.”

So far, Cox is continuing to defend Basile, who has been his right-hand man since he worked on the chairman’s short-lived US Senate bid back in 2006.

He was also instrumental in helping Cox defeat then-Niagara County GOP Chairman Henry Wojtaszek in the battle for the state chairmanship at a time when most of the GOP old guard – including former NYC Mayor Rudy Giuliani and former Gov. George Pataki – had lined up against Cox.

The drumbeat to replace Basile started long before the election. Republicans were unhappy with his brief flirtation with a possible run for the late Tom Morahan’s Senate seat during the convention, but the general gripe about him is that he’s difficult to work with and imperious.

My source suggested Matt Walter as a replacement for Basile.

Walter came out of ex-Senate Majority Leader Joe Bruno’s shop and went to work for the party when Bruno’s ally, Nassau County GOP Chairman Joe Mondello, was running things. He stayed on after Mondello was more or less pushed out after the party lost control of the majority, and later went to run Rick Laizo’s campaign, replacing Kevin Fullington following a shake-up.

Walter was technically on loan from the GOP to the Lazio campaign and was supposed to return to his old job, but he never did – according to my source, because he didn’t want to work with Basile.

Also mentioned as a potential Basile replacement: Free Enterprise Fund Executive Director E. O’Brien Murray, who is involved with the Monday Meeting and once worked for former state GOP Chairman Bill Powers.

UPDATE: A reader writes in to report another name being floated: Chapin Fay, who ran Harry Wilson’s comptroller campaign.

Getting rid of Basile would be something of a compromise move for Cox. It would be a way to stave off the calls for him to step down himself following a difficult election from which the GOP was supposed to emerge triumphant but ended up losing all the statewide races and possibly deadlocking the state Senate.

Getting rid of Cox would be difficult for his detractors, as there is no mechanism in the party’s rules for ousting a chairman in the middle of his tenure. Cox’s two-year term doesn’t end until next fall.

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