Dale Sutherland lived many lives during his lengthy career as an undercover cop with the Washington, DC police.

Once, he posed as a body shop owner. Another time, it was a Philadelphia mobster. On other occasions, he was in the import/export business — or just another heroin addict scoring drugs on the corner.

But though it all — including his 29-year run on the force — he treasured one role above all else: Preacher.

“I was a pastor and a policeman,” Sutherland, 60, of Vienna, Virginia, told The Post last week. “So I would be in Washington at night, making drug buys posing as a guy who owned a recording studio, and I’d be getting calls from church about a counseling meeting I had the next day.”

“Or, I would be at the church getting ready for a sermon, and I’d be getting texts or phone calls from drug dealers coming down with a large shipment of drugs,” he continued. “So it was like both worlds were really crazy together. It was a little confusing.”

Now, 11 years after he retired from the DC police, Sutherland has started his own podcast — appropriately dubbed “Cops, Criminals and Christ” — in which he not only explores how those three worlds intertwined, but also the peculiar dichotomy of being a God-fearing, Bible-toting man who lied for a living.

“The thing that I’m really good at is lying,” Sutherland, now a pastor at the CityLight Church in Falls Church, Virginia, said with a laugh. “I’m really good at that. Which is not exactly what you want from your local pastor. I scammed people for 22 years — I was telling them somebody I was not.”

“But the way we look at it is, the Bible is very clear about society needing protection from bad guys,” he said. “And this was a way to faithfully help the community to rid themselves of really bad people.”

“That was the way I mentally saw it,” the married father-of-three continued.

“And spiritually, I thought it was okay to go to the strip clubs or buy drugs and hang around these really rotten people with that goal. Because I really believed it was the best way to catch these guys. Nobody else is going to get them like we got them.”

Born in northern Maine, Sutherland said he spent 22 years working mostly undercover as he and his colleagues tried to bust up the gangs that prowled the Capitol city’s streets — everyone from MS-13 to foreign drug cartels to ultra-violent street gangs.

Sometimes that meant simple street buys in DC or Manhattan’s Washington Heights, where the job sometimes took him.

Other times, it meant lengthy cases where he’d create an identity, then stay in-character for months at a time.

Sometimes that meant simple street buys in DC or Manhattan’s Washington Heights, where the job sometimes took him.

To Sutherland, though, it was all the same.

“You’re using the same kind of skills,” he said. “But if you can buy drugs from a crowd at 178th and Broadway — to me, that’s the heart of undercover work.”

Sutherland loved the job — he said he would do it again right now, if he could.

But a life on the street is not without heartbreak — or danger.

He was nearly killed more than a half-dozen times, he said.

And in 1992, an informant with whom he had grown close was gunned down by a vicious street gang he was investigating, in an incident that nearly claimed Sutherland’s life as well.

“This informant and I went to make a buy,” Sutherland said. “We were late, which was typical for me. But that ended up saving my life because they had planned that when we arrived, they were going to shoot us both in the car.”