How far is too far?

The Wichita Eagle blog is run and edited by the Eagle reporters who regularly post items that are, supposedly, of interest to the citizens of Wichita. Every now and then I’ll run across a post and just sit back and wonder why it was published.

For instance, the tragic shooting of the Arkansas Democratic Party chairman yesterday. Rhonda Holman posted this today about the investigation:

“If you lost your job at a Target store, reportedly because you wrote on a wall, it doesn’t logically follow that you would drive 30 miles to the state’s Democratic Party headquarters and fatally shoot its chairman.”

It seems harmless enough, but is then followed by this:

“Indeed, maybe there are no conclusions to be drawn from Wednesday’s fatal shooting in Little Rock, other than that a disturbed gunman killed somebody and then was himself killed.”

“Still, in this time of bitter politics, you have to wonder: Was the murder of Arkansas Democratic Party chairman Bill Gwatney by Timothy Dale Johnson some kind of partisan hate crime?”

What purpose did that comment serve? What is Holman trying to do? A man has lost his life and yet a Wichita Eagle staffer insists on implying that the killer was motivated by party politics even though she highlights that what little evidence there is suggests that the man was mentally unstable.

Why? Why would you do that? Is there nothing else of substance going on the world that you have to make stuff up as you go along?