Eric Zorn and the crooked cop.

The story of Fox Lake’s Lt. Charles Joseph Gliniewicz is national news.

The creep staged his own suicide and became a hero of those that get their facts from Fox News. They claimed his murder was a result of the their imaginary anti-police movement.

Before he pulled the trigger Gliniewicz radioed in that he was on the trail of two white guys and a Black guy.

Apart from everything else, some people other than Gliniewicz could have ended up dead.

Innocent.

But dead.

This past week the press was given Gliniewicz’s file. It shows him to be a bad cop going all the way back to 1988.

In the 24 hours after he put a bullet hole in his chest, didn’t anyone check his personnel file before they organized hero rallies and tied blue ribbons around every tree in Lake County?

Leave it to the Tribune’s Eric Zorn to turn this into a pension story.

Of all the angles.

Of course, Zorn and the Tribune have had a bee up their butts about public employee pensions for years.

What a moment to bring it up again.

Zorn writes that the problem here is that the Gliniewicz family will get pension benefits.

That’s the first thing that pops into his head?

Not that this dirty cop, who was widely known to be a dirty cop for decades and almost got some innocent people killed, was given cover by plenty of people in Fox Lake.

Zorn wants a law passed immediately by the legislature to deny pension benefits to families in cases like this.

Cases like this?

If there are enough cases like this that we need a law, then there is a bigger problem here than pensions.

We need to stop thinking of pensions as punishment and reward.

Since Zorn is so concerned about pension fairness, maybe he can help us work on this: As a retired teacher on a state pension, I am not allowed to receive Social Security survivor benefits.

The pension case of Lt. Charles Joseph Gliniewicz that gets Zorn all excited is a one-off.

I wasn’t even a crooked cop who vacationed on money stolen from kids. I am already denied survivor benefits.

I’m no one-off. I’m one example of thousands.