How to create a read-only flag that can only be used by an admin to actually flag nodes? Long story short, I installed Flag because Best Answer was not working properly.  Is it possible to configure flags so that only the admin can flag something (aka an answer as being approved) but everyone can view the flag?
Try setup Flag as "global flag" and then in "Flag access" setup "Roles that may use this flag" check-boxes only for Admin.

If in this case flag will not be shown for other users - you need create script that get flag value for each node and display this info.

$flag = flag_get_flag(FLAG_NAME);
$node-&gt;flag_value = $flag-&gt;get_count($node-&gt;nid);