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House Speaker Thom Tillis issued a warning last weekend to his fellow Repubicans about overreaching with their supermajority power.

"I was the GOP minority whip in 2009," he began in a Facebook post. "My job was to get conservative Democrats to help us defeat liberal legislation. The Democratic leaders, heavily influenced by their most liberal members and far-left groups, could not resist the pressure to move too far to fast. They did not compromise and they went too far.

"They got out of step with the citizens of NC and they lost their majority as a result. It was their lack of discipline that laid the groundwork for Republicans to have House/Senate super majorities, a GOP governor, and (lieutenant) governor," he concluded. "Our lack of discipline will lay the groundwork for their ascendency and if they succeed we will only have ourselves to blame."

What generated the post is unclear. A Tillis spokesman declined to elaborate and answer specific questions. "Speaker Tillis was simply recapping what occurred under Democratic leadership before Republicans won a majority in 2010, and pointing out that the Republican majority should learn from the mistakes of Democratic leadership of the past," spokesman Jordan Shaw said Monday.

House Speaker Thom Tillis "resigned" this weekend. Maybe you missed it in the hoopla about the Democratic scramble to replace Gov. Bev Perdue on the 2012 ballot. Or maybe it was a "joke," as his office suggested, to make a point about some biased media sources.

"It's a tongue-in-cheek sarcastic thing," Tillis spokesman Jordan Shaw said Monday. (Such an explanation didn't work well for Perdue -- but her gaffe about suspending elections doesn't match Tillis' "resignation," Shaw says.)

Either way, Tillis' email is an intriguing look at how the state's top Republican's message sometimes strikes a different tone than the official word he distributes from his office.

Take the news that Perdue wouldn't seek re-election. The officials statement from her office thanked her for her service, and despite their differences, expressed hope about working together. But days later on Facebook, Tillis suggested that Perdue's reason for not running again wasn't legit and her decision amounted to surrender.