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Carteret, New Jersey, June 6, 1992

At a Council meeting in Carteret in June 1992, Mayor Peter J. Sica, who is 56, bolted from his seat and punched a much larger and younger man who had insulted his wife.

As the Mayor tells it, it was during a heated meeting and he was going through the fairly innocuous business of appointing citizens to unpaid positions on a board that would make municipal buildings accessible to the disabled. His wife, who had been serving as the unsalaried chairman of a municipal commission for the disabled for years, was the last. As he said her name, he heard a man in the audience call Mrs. Sica ''a whore.''

''So I said,'' Mayor Sica recalled, 'I'm going to come down from here and knock your head right off your shoulders.' And he said, 'Come on.'

''So I did.''

During his 15 years as Mayor, Mr. Sica said, he has been called every name in the book and even spit on, but that insult crossed the line.