Colonel is a base theme itself based on the core theme Classy. It contains the basic styles for starting a project (normalize, grid system, typographic styles, etc...). However Colonel can not be used alone.
You should use the subtheme called SubColonel (which is inside the Colonel theme).
SubColonel is divided into components that are fully coupled to Colonel.
We import Colonel's SCSS file and then we define the variables. It avoids overrides and duplicated code.