The Senate took a small but welcome step toward getting a handle on military spending Tuesday by voting to clip the wings of the Air Force’s hugely expensive F-22 Raptor.

    The vote should have been a formality.

    After all, Defense Secretary Robert Gates told Congress he doesn’t want to continue the Lockheed Martin Corp fighter jet program: It’s too expensive, the country already has 141 (with 46 more on the way), and it doesn’t have much of a role to play in the kind of wars the United States is fighting now or expects to fight in coming years.

    Raptors — primarily designed for air-to-air combat — haven’t been used in Iraq and Afghanistan, and the Pentagon figures it could better spend the $1.75 billion to build seven more planes on something it can actually use.

    What a concept.

    Even so, 40 senators — including Washington’s Patty Murray and Maria Cantwell — voted to preserve funding for the Raptor.

    Fortunately, 54 others voted to follow the defense secretary’s advice and heed President Obama’s threat to veto the entire $664 billion defense appropriations bill if it included funding for the F-22 — which costs about $331 million per jet.

    This is a program that’s been opposed not just by the Obama administration, but by George W. Bush and Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz.

    Yes, Boeing has a stake in the program (most of the Raptor-related jobs, however, are in Georgia and Connecticut). But fiscal responsibility and attention to military realities should guide lawmakers’ decisions, not whether a few jobs back home might be preserved.

    The administration wants to divert F-22 funding to the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter — a plane that the Navy and Marine Corps could also use and which Gates says would be more useful in combat. It is also built by Lockheed Martin.

    Now it’s up to the House of Representatives to go along with the Senate in conference committee. That’s not a given; the House has already approved a budget that would fund five more Raptors than the Senate would have.

    Gates is trying to change what he calls the “business as usual” way of funding military programs — one based more on providing pork for members of Congress than on increasing military readiness.

    That’s a worthy goal, and Washington’s delegation should recognize it.