With its beer, cheese and cased meats, Milwaukee is a model in tasty (though not necessarily healthy) eating and drinking.

Less known is that it’s – at least in part – also a model for pension reform, a place Illinois can, and should, look to as it tries to get its fiscal house in order.

Specifically, we’re talking about how Milwaukee handles “duty disability” claims for public-sector employees, cops in particular.

Before we get into the how and why, a primer on what duty disability entails from a police perspective:

In short, it’s a special status for police officers that are hurt on the job and can no longer perform the job safely or fully.

Not all police departments have “light duty” – where an injured cop is assigned shuffling papers or answering the phone – and they can’t just fire a hurt cop. That obviously wouldn’t be fair.

So duty disability helps usher a hurt officer off the force, but with a portion of his or her salary continuing to be paid through a public-sector pension fund.

Because this is Illinois – where seemingly nothing is easy – there are problems with how this works.

News reports over the past year or two have found monitoring of injured officers from the Chicago Police Department to be quite lacking, as some cops were caught by the media allegedly faking injuries – or the severity of injuries – apparently so they could get out of work and still get a paycheck.

But beyond poor oversight, the BGA has been looking at state laws and local rules governing duty disability in Illinois and found they too are lacking, and probably need a real overhaul.

We owe it to those truly disabled, to the taxpayers and to the pension funds themselves, which are already stressed in large part because of chronic underfunding, pension spiking and double-dip pay-rollers.

One possible reform option: The Milwaukee model.

In Illinois, those on duty disability can get 65 percent (if they’re Downstate or suburban cops) or up to 75 percent (if they’re City of Chicago cops) of their salaries indefinitely, until they’re deemed fit to return to work or until they reach retirement age and start collecting their real pension.

During the time officers are on duty-disability status, they are free to work other jobs (generally any job that doesn’t conflict with their injury) and make as much money as they can. There are no restrictions on outside earnings.

For instance, we found a suburban Chicago cop who went on duty disability after a car wreck and is drawing about $35,000 a year in duty-disability payments from the village’s police pension fund – which happens to be alarmingly underfunded, with just about a third of the money needed to cover projected payouts. He also is now working for the Transportation Security Administration, a federal agency providing security at airports, and is pulling in about $80,000 a year from the TSA. He gets to keep both paychecks.

News reports over the past year or two have found monitoring of injured officers from the Chicago Police Department to be quite lacking, as some cops were caught by the media allegedly faking injuries – or the severity of injuries – apparently so they could get out of work and still get a paycheck.

It’s perfectly legal in Illinois to not only work a second job, but also to work other government jobs (with some exceptions.)

We’re not trying to deny police or any other public servant a decent living. But we also have to be realistic and fair.

In Milwaukee, outside pay for officers on duty disability is capped.

Milwaukee cops get 75 percent of their salary while on duty disability. They are allowed to recoup that remaining 25 percent – the difference between their duty-disability pay and their pre-disability salary – through outside work, with no penalty.

But if their outside employment surpasses their final pre-disability salary level, then their disability payments drop in a corresponding manner.

Some quick hypothetical math: If a Milwaukee cop is making $100,000 a year and goes on duty disability, he or she would collect $75,000 a year from the pension fund, and he or she would be free to make $25,000 a year from another job.

But, for every dollar earned from an outside job above that $25,000, a dollar is subtracted from duty disability pay.

To put this in perspective with a real-life example, there was a Milwaukee cop, injured on the job, who went on duty disability and later became a doctor, according to the local pension fund. Outside earnings predictably jumped and ended up so large, the cop no longer qualified for any duty-disability payments.

(For what it’s worth, the Illinois State Police have a variation on Milwaukee’s model, though a little tougher on outside employment. Illinois state troopers get 75 percent of their salary for duty disability and are capped at outside earrings of about $2,500 a quarter. If outside earnings exceed that cap, duty disability can be suspended or terminated, according to the state-government pension fund administering the program.)

To be clear, we need to take care of all first-responders hurt on the job. They risk life and limb for us, and that is the least we can do.

But we also owe it to the community at large to remedy the pension crisis, because taxpayers are paying the freight. In Chicago alone, duty-disability costs topped $15 million last year.

Fixing the way duty disability works is a small but crucial part of pension reform. We should look north for ideas.