Editorial: Gliniewicz case gave us a reminder of importance of discretion

We remember distinctly where we were when we first heard that a police officer had been shot in Fox Lake. During our regular Tuesday morning editors confab we heard in quick succession that Grant High School in town was on lockdown and that one of our reporters had heard a cop had been shot.

Lake County Editor Pete Nenni jumped out of his seat to begin marshaling the forces: Get the basics confirmed, post something short to the website, send out an e-blast to our readers, get photographers and writers to the scene.

It's what news organizations do. We triage breaking news. We get feelers out in as many places as possible, post what we know, hold onto what we don't know until we can confirm it.

A story can take many twists before we finally put it in the paper the next morning. In the age of the Internet, you can see how a story develops during the day in real time.

What none of us knew or even suspected early that Tuesday morning in September was that Lt. Charles Joseph Gliniewicz had shot himself — twice — and had staged it elaborately to make it seem as if he had been killed by three men he had been “chasing.”

We didn't know initially whether the officer was alive or dead. We waited until we could confirm it with an official source before we announced it. Within an hour of our initial phone call, we had figured out who the officer was. We sat on that information for a couple of hours until we could confirm it.

Meanwhile, reporter Lee Filas worked up a backgrounder on a man he had known and written about for a dozen years or more — the colorful cop who was known as G.I. Joe because he often wore Army camo instead of his Fox Lake uniform, the guy who loved the Shop With a Cop program, the guy who taught teens in the Explorer program how to shoot, take down a suspect, investigate a case.

We were, as we always strive to be, very, very careful to ensure that we got the details right. And on that day, when so much was going on, we got one thing very wrong.

We made the assumption — given the evidence police had divulged, given the hundreds of people searching for three suspects and given the answers we got from investigating agencies — that Gliniewicz had been murdered. We made the leap of portraying him as a hero cop in this very space. We said that by all accounts he was a stand-up guy.

We certainly weren't alone in our initial assessment of the situation. But that's no excuse.

We learn new things every day in this business, especially when we're tracking a major story. And we're often reminded of things we may have forgotten.

Journalists are professional skeptics. We're the people who spend our days examining what's told or shown to us in an effort to get at the truth. That's what you pay us for.

The clarion call of the old City News Bureau in Chicago was, “If your mother says she loves you, check it out.”

If we learned one thing through the twists and turns of this bizarre tale, it's that we must never take anything at face value. It may sound harsh, coming from a community newspaper. “Trust but verify,” Ronald Reagan said.

That's our solemn vow to you.