It's puzzling this tendency to assume that someone who does something very bad - of a degree that we're even inclined to say of it that it's evil - must be crazy. Thus, Deborah Orr about Anders Behring Breivik:
How can a man capable of carrying out the acts that he did be anything else?
Thus Simon Jenkins likewise: 'A man so insane he can see nothing wrong in shooting dead 68 young people in cold blood is so exceptional as to be of interest to criminology and brain science' - but that's all there is to it.
Yet if he's insane, he's ill, right? How come these commentators don't wait upon some medical opinion to corroborate their view? If they think Breivik must be mad to have done what he did, then they for their part can only have been asleep these last few thousand years. As Mr Brendan Kelly writes on today's Guardian letters page, articulating 'an unpalatable truth': 'sane people sometimes do very, very bad things'.