Time to cool it on the cellblock sex story, yes? A sense of proportion about this essentially trivial affair would not go amiss.

Talk of serious crimes and criminal charges. Four separate investigations brought to bear. Uninformed knee-jerk intervention by a civil libertarian group.  Off-the-cuff analysis by an academic self-styled criminologist based on gossip. The lead story on CBC's Tuesday nightly newscast. 

I'd call it hyperinflation.

So a handful of guys at the Kamloops RCMP detachment fall prey for a few minutes to prurience, one of the more common human impulses. Not a hanging offence, surely. Indeed pandering to prurience is, I suspect, an element in press coverage of this incident. News flash: Sex Sells!

The two ladies involved were making love not war. No urgent need on this occasion for intervention by the RCMP Emergency Response Team, one would imagine. By all accounts, there's nothing in the RCMP manual to, er, cover this situation.

Media treatment of this so-called scandal is of a piece with the current urge in some quarters to discredit the RCMP. Your entire Letters page on Monday was given over to writers bashing the force. This no doubt delights those who advocate trading in the RCMP for our very own police force. Given the sorry history of corruption, incompetence and political interference often found in city-operated police units, one might caution: Be careful what you wish for.

While engaging our salacious interest now, the sex-in-cells affair will in the long run be seen as inconsequential, which it is. It might though provide material for a Monty Python sketch. ("Hey, sarge, take a look at this. What can these girls be up to?  Want me to crank up the zoom a touch?")

STEPHEN TROWER

Kamloops