Every once in awhile, we newspaper columnists, raging and fulminating at our keyboards, go too far -- we overstate, we gloss over nuance, we generalize unfairly, we give offense we don't intend while trying to be funny or profound, or we otherwise lose our rhetorical way.

And if we're lucky, we have an editor who saves us.

If we're lucky we have an editor who tells us, "I know what you're trying to say, but this piece isn't working. What you've written is (confusing / gratuitously inflammatory / unfair / silly). I recommend you (insert constructive suggestion here) and try again."

Freelance columnist Mohammad Sagha of the Naperville Sun wasn't lucky.

A week ago Friday, Sagha (right) submitted a column on the subject of patriotism that didn't work. Its argument didn't quite track and it was too intemperate and sweeping to be persuasive. Here's a passage:

The 9/11 generation is being raised somewhat similarly to how the youth of the Red Scare were raised which included confusion, misinformation, fear, nationalism, and undue support of our elite rulers. But we have traitors on our hands. We have war hawks, instigators, oppressors and conquering emperors who have brought nothing but death and anguish to the Iraqis.

Read the entire column below in the comments section.

Not to slag a brother in ink. Writers with more age and experience than Sagha -- he's a 17-year-old high school senior -- have certainly written worse. And judging by a set of other columns he sent along, he has certainly written better since he began appearing every other week in the Sun last fall.

Monday, then, the patriotism column ran with only minor changes on page two of the newspaper.

Sagha said he recieved two e-mail messages from opinion page editor Tim West that day, both of which arrived while he was at school.

The first urged him to stop writing about politics and stick to high school themes, Sagha said, and warned him that if he didn't do so in the future, his columns would not be published.

Such a request is certainly in bounds. Editors prefer columnists not to stray too far too often from their niches, and editors are certainly free to define and even re-define those niches as things go along.

Sagha had been writing quite a bit about politics -- "Our freedoms are under attack," he wrote in his previous column. President Bush "is a war hawk whose illogical foreign policies have led to the direct deaths of 4,000 Americans." He'd recently used his column to promote the idea that college students should be allowed to carry concealed weapons.

And he told me that although his editors had previously encouraged him to stick to issues of interest to teenagers, they had never told him to stay away from political topics.

But, again, the Naperville Sun is always free to change its mind about what it wants to publish.

The second message from West, Sagha said, came three and a half hours later and said the Sun was discontinuing his column immediately.



Again, in bounds. Papers discontinue columns from time to time. Usually editors give warning if they're growing dissatisfied and perhaps offer the columnist an opportunity to change, but not always.

Where the Sun went out of bounds, though, was in tossing Sagha under the wheels the next day in a prominent apology authored by editor and publisher Jim Lynch.

Lynch blasted "the inflammatory, ill-informed comments that appeared in Mohammad Sagha's column ..The Sun does not in any way endorse or approve of Mr. Sagha's comments and regrets they were published."

Whose fault was it that they were published?

Not Sagha's. He submitted an original, unplagiarized, non-libelous column and gave the paper an entire weekend to consider it.

Lynch admitted that in his note to readers:

We here at the Sun are responsible for everything that goes into the paper and on our Web site....sometimes mistakes are made.

So who paid the price for this mistake by losing a paying gig ($50 per column) and having his reputation trashed in his home newspaper? Mohammad Sagha, whose name has been all but removed from the Sun's Web archives.

I called opinion page editor Tim West. He referred me to Lynch, who replied to an assortment of questions I sent via e-mail with this one-line response:

Our published apology is addressed to our readership and speaks for itself.

Sagha said Lynch told him in a phone conversation later that he, Lynch, was sorry about how it all came down but that he, Sagha, should consider it a life's lesson.

To me, Zorn, that lesson looks like this: Crap flows downhill, kid.

ONLINE: Letters to the Editor of the Naperville Sun about Sagha's column