In asymmetric encryption, the private key is used for decrypting things which were encrypted using the corresponding public key. You don't encrypt things using the private key.
The problem here is that Meshtastic doesn't have any means whatsoever of ensuring that a public key is authentic, and they allow keys to be replaced at any time. Verifying keys out-of-band would be the most secure approach, but to enable encryption between nodes who don't do that the thing Meshtastic should be doing is ssh-style TOFU (meaning that users must explicitly acknowledge when a key changes before using the new key).