What’s truly stunning about Fidelity’s latest bombshell regarding its intentions to move jobs out of the state is not that Fidelity gave only a bare minimum of advance notice to Gov. Patrick about the firm’s latest decision. Rather, it’s that Patrick can claim – without embarrassment – that he was somehow in the dark about the whole thing.

With all due respect, governor, what bubble have you been living in for the past five years?

Boston-based Fidelity’s pattern of moving jobs out of its home state first came squarely into public view when a certain reporter at the Boston Herald broke the news back in January 2006.

It involved then, as now, a decision to move employees out of Marlborough – and at that time from a downtown Boston office tower as well – to Fidelity’s Rhode Island campus, then undergoing a major expansion.

So Fidelity’s latest move, which has put a damper on the state’s economic rebound and threatens to punch a big hole in the suburban office market, hardly came without warning.

“Fidelity is definitely finding better, if not greener, pastures for itself beyond the Boston pale,” Jim Lowell, editor and owner of the Fidelity Investor newsletter, said in that 2006 story.

No one-off piece, my colleagues and I followed it up with several more stories over the next few months examining Fidelity’s plans to build sprawling corporate campuses in Texas, North Carolina and Florida.

Tough Questions, Hard Answers

I am not disputing that Patrick felt jilted when Fidelity announced its latest move, with a day’s notice to his staff, as he entered the last wing of a 23-day international trade junket. And the governor has come out swinging, saying he wants Fidelity to declare “to my face” the decision is final.

Not to be outdone, blowhards on Beacon Hill are scrambling to one-up the governor in his outrage, pledging to haul Fidelity patriarch Ned Johnson and his daughter, Abigail, the company’s president, before a kangaroo court of a public hearing.

But it is Patrick and legislative leaders that deserve the grilling here, not the other way around.

Where were our sage state leaders during the past half decade, after it became clear that Fidelity was engaged in a strategy of shifting jobs and channeling growth to lower-cost states? Why weren’t Patrick and legislative leaders banging down Ned Johnson’s door then to try and get some answers to this troubling trend by the state’s largest employer?

Back in 2006, when the story first broke that Fidelity was shifting jobs to other states, it still had 13,000 employees in Massachusetts. That number is soon to hit 7,300 after the financial services giant completes its latest job shift.

Well maybe the reason they weren’t asking the questions then is because the answers they would have been given are not the ones they really wanted to hear.

I won’t presume to have a clue what Ned Johnson, a brilliant man who has both made a fortune and done worlds of good over the years for his home state, is thinking.

But like other major employers, Fidelity faces a punishing business climate here in Massachusetts, full of nasty little tax quirks that hurt companies we say we love. We also feature some of the highest costs around.

Greater Boston home prices remain out of reach for many, despite an epic downturn nationally, while our health care and electricity costs are obscene.

That means it simply costs a lot more to hire middle-class professionals here than it does in North Carolina or Florida, and companies are voting with their feet.

Real Estate Ramifications

So where do we go from here?

Luckily, the local economy is on the upswing, so the jobs Fidelity moves out are likely to be replaced, though it has certainly cast a pall over the recovery.

But the suburban real estate market along Interstate 495 may not rebound as quickly.

The 495 West market is already burdened with a 33.6 percent vacancy rate, according to data from Colliers International, and Fidelity’s decision to close its Marlborough campus will put another 700,000 square feet or more on the market.

“You wonder who is the user for that big space,” noted one local real estate executive.

Certainly it would be nice to think that Fidelity’s latest out-of-state job shipment will serve as a wakeup call to our governor.

But right now it looks like Patrick will simply hit the snooze button, having chewed out Fidelity for so rudely awakening him from his blissful slumber.