Sometimes, we in our shop will refrain from covering an important story because it’s too new, too fresh, and too murky. Such was the case yesterday morning when we waited to weigh in on the atrocity that took place in the Milwaukee suburb of Waukesha. There, on Sunday afternoon, folks young and old were enjoying the town’s annual Christmas parade when a violent career criminal named Darrell Brooks, a Black Lives Matter supporter who’d posted bail just two days earlier, bypassed a series of barricades and drove his red SUV straight through the crowd of revelers, killing five and injuring dozens.

Was the attack racially motivated? We don’t yet know. But the same mainstream media that was so eager to inject race into the Kyle Rittenhouse trial — a trial in which a 17-year-old white kid shot three white thugs in self-defense — seems suspiciously uninterested in asking any questions about the motivations of the Waukesha assailant.

As the Wall Street Journal editorial board reports: “Police say 39-year-old Darrell Brooks faces five counts of intentional homicide, and more lives are in jeopardy in area hospitals. The dead include members of the Dancing Grannies, a fixture at the annual parade and other Milwaukee-area events. Eighteen children were admitted to a local children’s hospital and trauma center, including 10 in intensive care.”

Now that we know the what, the how, and the who, the questions that must be asked all begin with why?

For example: Why did this happen? Why was Brooks not in prison, given his extensive criminal record? Why had his bail been set so low as to allow him to leave the lockup even though he was being held on multiple charges? Why does it seem that the pendulum of our criminal justice system has swung wildly in the direction of coddling violent criminals and away from protecting the citizenry?

Before his murderous Sunday rampage, Brooks’s rap sheet was 50 pages long and included felony strangulation, aggravated battery, felony bail jumping, felony reckless endangerment, multiple domestic abuse charges, disorderly conduct, and much more. He’s also a registered sex offender in Nevada, where he faces additional charges. And an aspiring rapper. Recently, according to the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, an acquaintance of Brooks told police that he’d stalked her and tried to run her over with his vehicle. And yet for some reason, he wasn’t behind bars where he belonged.

One wonders how many public servants dropped the ball here. How many of them could’ve denied Brooks the freedom to do what he did on Sunday? A good place to start would be with Milwaukee County District Attorney John Chisholm, an unscrupulous Democrat partisan whose office said it’s conducting an internal review of the bail decision, which allowed Brooks to skip upon posting a paltry $1,000. (Chisholm is the same rogue prosecutor who conducted the infamous and despicable “John Doe” investigations against former Governor Scott Walker and other Wisconsin Republicans.)

“The state’s bail recommendation in this case was inappropriately low in light of the nature of the recent charges and pending charges against Mr. Brooks,” said Chisholm’s office in a statement. “Inappropriately low” is an understatement, especially given that this guy had multiple cases pending in court.

Prisons exist not only to punish criminals but to keep the rest of us safe from those who can’t control themselves. And Darrell Brooks’s criminal record made it clear long before Sunday that he couldn’t control himself. He was a known threat, a known danger, a known menace to society. And yet he was turned loose upon the public.

At least one deeply twisted Democrat, though, seemed to revel in the carnage. That would be Mary Lemanski, who until submitting her resignation yesterday was the social media director for the Democrat Party in DuPage County, Illinois. “It was probably just self-defense,” she tweeted, with hashtags to “Wisconsin” and “Kyle Rittenhouse,” in a post that has since been deleted. “You reap what you sow, Wisconsin,” she said in another.

Sick. Just sick.

But in the end, this isn’t about a single despicable Democrat. It’s about the entire soft-on-crime Democrat Party having abjectly failed the people of Waukesha.