How come, the writer who claimed to be a retired police chief asked me in an angry letter, "you have had something bad to say every time law enforcement screws up," yet you have nothing to say when two die in the line of duty?

"Did it bring a slight smile to your face when they were killed?" he asked.

He was referring to the Onslow County sheriff's deputy who was hit by a tractor-trailer June 14 while directing traffic on a fog-shrouded road and the state trooper who, days later, was killed on the side of a dark road after making a traffic stop.

Indignant? You bet. That's why I was fixing to tell the former so-called chief what he could do with his badge and opinion when I realized -- darn it -- the dude was right.

Not about the "smile" part; only a diseased mind could even form and ask such a question.

He was right that the deaths -- no, the lives -- of Onslow County Sheriff's Deputy Steve Boehm and state Trooper David Shawn Blanton Jr. deserved more attention than they got.

Deputy Boehm was 36; Trooper Blanton, 24.

When I found out that Blanton's infant son, Tye, has been hospitalized for weeks in critical condition -- meaning Michaela Blanton might suffer the inconceivably tragic loss of her husband and baby within a month of each other -- I knew you ought to hear more about his story.

You ought to hear about how he loved hunting and fishing with his dad when he was a boy, about how, even as a trooper, he played softball in two leagues, and about how, after patrolling the state's roads, he would stop, bone-tired, by his dad's house on his way to coach the junior varsity girls' softball team at Smoky Mountain High School.

"Anything that involved a ball, he did," his father, David Shawn Blanton Sr., told me. "He was good at everything. ... He was all-conference in football, and he wrestled. He went to college in Greenville, Tenn., and played football there for a year, but when he hurt his knee, he decided he wanted to be in law enforcement."

It is way too easy to focus on the rare occasions when cops kick dogs or fondle women, because we take for granted that most of them will do the right thing. When one doesn't live up to the uniform, we are shocked, and we have a duty to let you know.

We also need to let you know when they do live up to it. And die in it.

Blanton's first job was as a dispatcher for the Cherokee Police Department, his dad said.

How, I asked him, did he feel about his son becoming a state trooper at age 22?

"I was proud," the elder Blanton said. "I was behind him 100 percent."

Now that David Shawn Blanton Jr. is dead at 24 and his son -- born seven weeks prematurely -- is struggling to survive, it would be great if we, too, got behind him 100 percent.

David Blanton Sr. said funds have been set up for Trooper Blanton at the Mountain Credit Union, P.O. Box 241, Cherokee, NC 28719 or for Michaela and Tye Blanton at the State Troopers Credit Union, P.O. Box 97, Waynesville, NC 28786.

Darned right, we're still going to let you know about cops who kick dogs and cop feels off defenseless women. We also, though, need to let you know about officers who put themselves on the line for us every day, patrolling dark highways and confronting deadly menaces.