Seven deadlies in Fox Lake

An emotional Fox Lake Mayor Donny Schmit described the slain officer as a personal friend, a three-decade member of the department and a father of four sons. 

"We lost a family member," Schmit said of the 52-year-old officer known around town as "GI Joe." ''His commitment to the people of this community has been unmatched and will be dearly missed." 

"This particular officer is a pillar in my community and definitely going to be missed, and (he) touched so many lives," said Gina Maria, a 40-year-old teacher who lives in the community.

So it turns out that on this one, they were all wrong--the mayor, the teacher, the whole community, his wife, his sons, and just about everyone. What G. I. Joe called in as a traffic stop gone mad was really a suicide meticulously choreographed.

Lt. Charles Joseph "Joe" Gliniewicz, 52, had told dispatchers that he was out of his squad car chasing three men down, on foot, just outside Fox Lake, Illinois, a town of about 10,000. He lied. Multiple times. About a lot of things. Lied viciously and cruelly. When the prickly nest of falsehood he'd spun for himself threatened to unravel, he took his own life. 

He's the villain here--no one else. But the man got used royally in the political teapot America has become. Everybody played the race card. Conservatives couldn't help but blame Obama for G. I. Joe's death because Obama is so utterly demonic that he's responsible for every evil in these United States since about 2008 and maybe before. His racism--he's for African-Americans and against our men in blue--opened the door for level of warfare of which G. I. Joe was a victim. The blue nation went into mourning.

So now it turns out G. I. Joe was a more hardened criminal than anyone he'd ever arrested in a thirty-year career in Fox Lake. Officials claim he plotted the death of a councilwoman whose probes into a non-profit fund he juiced threatened to expose him for the lying cheat that he was. There's more, too--lots more.

Now that the whole sorry tale has taken an unimaginable turn, progressives can't help but play gotcha with the Fox News types who got the whole story so impossibly wrong. Yesterday, Charles Blow of the NY Times couldn't help but throw the whole mess in the face of those who were crowing that Black Lives Matter was guilty of G.I. Joe's death. 

But if you can step back from the politics, the whole sorry mess is proof of one of my favorites lines from ancient folk wisdom: "he who sups with the Devil had best use a long spoon." 

Maybe it's just me, but I find it impossible to imagine the cold rationality of the Gliniewicz's sheer madness. He thoughtfully created a story to cover his suicide, took two shots to his body, then struggled along for some time before putting his service revolver to his temple. He killed himself as a lie to hold the reputation the teacher claimed for him, "a pillar in my community." He wanted the blessing of a send-off that would bring thousands of lawmen together in mourning, and it worked.

For a couple of weeks.

The story is not about Obama or Black Lives Matter or our beleaguered men in blue. It's about evil, real indisputable evil by way of pride and envy, lust and greed. It's about sin, all seven of the deadlies in one horrific story. They're all here, in spades, in a small Illinois town that's got be dying itself right now.

See this picture? See the kid in the tie and blue shirt? In truth, there's the story.