”

The governor defended his remark on Monday, saying: “He acted like an idiot. He’s an idiot. I don’t have any regret about it at all.” He said that he respected Mr. Brown’s eight years in the military, but that that “doesn’t give him the right to be a jerk.”

Mr. Brown, who lives in Mount Laurel and ran for the State Assembly as a Democrat in 2010, called Mr. Christie “delusional.”

“Town hall meetings are not the courtroom,” he said in a telephone interview on Tuesday. He criticized Mr. Christie for “what he’s doing to humiliate citizens when they speak against ideas they disagree with.”