First things first: To the nearly 26,000 National Guardsmen who left their friends, their families, and their communities to take part in a nearly 20-week deployment in our nation’s capital, we say, Thank you.

By now, the Guardsmen are back home where they belong. They left DC to little fanfare, and the $521 million tab for their services was money poorly spent. Of course, that’s no fault of their own; it’s simply what we’ve come to expect from Nancy Pelosi and her fellow Chicken Little Democrats.

We’ve also come to expect the mainstream media to misreport the news, and the Associated Press didn’t disappoint. “Nearly five months after being deployed to the U.S. Capitol to help quell the Jan. 6 insurrection,” the AP wrote on Sunday, “National Guard troops were set to leave and turn over security of the area to Capitol Police.”

Other than the fact that it wasn’t an “insurrection,” and that the earliest Guardsmen didn’t arrive at the Capitol until well after the non-armed non-insurrection was over, the AP’s lead sentence was accurate. At least the news service didn’t call it a “deadly insurrection,” because then we’d have had to point out that the only death that occurred within the Capitol was that of 35-year-old Ashli Babbitt, an unarmed supporter of Donald Trump and 14-year Air Force veteran who was shot by a still-unnamed Capitol policeman.

As it turned out, and as all sentient observers had naturally expected, the Guard’s DC tour was a quiet one — at least from a violence standpoint. The rioters had, after all, made their point on January 6, and they’d long since been rounded up and put behind bars for 22-23 hours a day to await due process for such deadly serious crimes as knowingly entering or remaining in restricted grounds without authority and obstruction of an official proceeding. Nearly five months later, they’re still waiting, much to the disgrace of the District and its mayor, Muriel Bowser. (We should note that a Capitol policeman, William “Billy” Evans, was murdered near the Capitol on April 2 by Noah Zaeem Muhammad, an acolyte of Nation of Islam hatemonger Louis Farrakhan.)

As for the Guard’s lodging, it wasn’t exactly The Four Seasons. As the New York Post’s Bruce Golding reports, “The National Guard’s stay in the capital has been marked by controversy, including stunning photos of troops forced to sleep on the marble floors of the Capitol ahead of Biden’s inauguration. About 150 guard members also reportedly tested positive for the coronavirus in late January, and more than a dozen were reportedly later sickened by undercooked meat in their meals, some of which were also found to contain metal shavings.”

Also in January, the Guard was unceremoniously kicked out of the Capitol complex and forced to bivouac in a nearby parking garage, apparently because a Massachusetts Democrat, Bill Keating, saw a single Guardsman at a Dunkin Donuts — horrors! — without a mask.

Russel Honoré, a retired Army lieutenant general and avowed Trump hater, oversaw a security review in the wake of the January 6 riot, and he told CBS’s “Face the Nation” on Sunday that the Capitol itself will be secured by Capitol Police from here forward, but that the complex will remain closed to the general public because of the strain on the police force.

Closed to the public, eh? What a disgrace. So much for “The People’s House.”

Back on February 5, as we neared the one-month anniversary of the Guard’s presence in DC, we argued that Nancy Pelosi and her fellow Democrats had milked their presence for all it was worth and that it was long past time to thank them and return them home to their communities. Nearly four months later, they’ve finally headed home — to their credit, and to the speaker’s shame.