Hardly anyone, including me, is likely to lose any sleep over yesterday’s verdict in federal court in Salt Lake City that found David Brian Mitchell guilty of kidnapping Elizabeth Smart and transporting her across state lines for purposes of sexual activity. And yet, it’s hard not to believe that Mitchell is crazy as a bedbug–as in a paranoid schizophrenic suffering under the delusion that God ordered him to acquire many wives in order to be equipped to combat the Antichrist in the End Times. Peggy Fletcher Stack, the Salt Lake Tribune‘s exemplary religion writer, has a long take-out exploring the conundrum of distinguishing an inspired prophet from someone who’s merely insane.The feds ended up trying Mitchell because a state judge found him mentally incompetent to stand trial.

Maybe Mitchell was faking it, but pretty much everybody, including the Tribune editorial applauding the verdict, thought he was crazy–just not crazy enough not to deserve to be found guilty. For my part, I don’t think that, short of spending all his time rolling on the floor and foaming at the mouth, a man who did to a teenage girl what Mitchell did to Smart, was going to be able to avoid a guilty verdict, no matter what the clinical diagnosis was.