Call it the "Janus Conceit": the fiction that admin post as different "personas", independant of each other and not influenced by each other, even if an admin mods a thread he himself is participating in.
Nobody is suggesting that they are different people. However, they are different roles. To err is human, but we expect those acting in an administrator role to attempt to be superhuman.
No, they're not different roles. It's the same person. And to expect the rest of us to adhere to this fiction is insulting and rude.
I remember how it started, you know. Minnemooseus started it, if I recall correctly. It was a cute conceit in his writing, a way to make moderation a little more interesting and make it appear "fair" when the Moose moderated threads in which he was participating.
But apparently it caught on. The newest outrage is that, apparently, the admins can demand that the rest of us play the same game, and that's taking it too far. Immature? Inappropriate, as I was accused by Jar? What's inappropriate is the suggestion that an admins moderation doesn't reflect on them as a person and a poster, and vice-versa.
If we're going to "anoint" admins from the general posting populace, by fiat by the rest of the admins, then its inconsistent, in fact, to assert that a poster's bad habits don't reflect on the quality of their moderation. If that's true, why were they picked to be a moderator in the first place?
As it is, the policy simply ensures that the squeakiest posters with the worst habits will ascend to adminhood, placing their bad behavior above reproach and allowing them even greater power to exact unfair retribution against their opponents.
I call on the admins to voluntarily reject this fiction. To voluntarily abstain from moderating threads in which they have participated. And I call for the procedures for dealing with moderator abuse to be developed and made explicit.
Either that, or if moderators suddenly have a basis to insist that an admin's behavior as a poster doesn't reflect on their suitability to be a moderator, then I'd like to see the forum rule that makes that explicit. There seems to be an increasing number of such rules, these days.