“Benghazi-gate.” It’s got that sound, that feel of a great political zinger. A one liner that simultaneously calls up images of carnage surrounding our embassy and Richard Nixon throwing up two peace signs as he exits his chopper. There seems to be so much shock over the events in Benghazi. There’s not exactly a revelation here though. The government lies to you. Imagine that.

There is no doubting the fact that President Barack Obama knew a terrorist attack had occurred. There was no doubt that members of his administration knew that the lives lost were not because of spontaneous protests over an inflammatory video that had surfaced. However, there is no basis for the idea Brian Van Pelt posited in his Oct. 29 article, “Bengzhazi-gate,” that the president purposefully withheld information about this brazen terrorist attack for political purposes.

President Obama’s supposed decision willfully to deceive the American people for political purposes would have made little to no political sense. Willfully lying might protect the image of a strong foreign policy record in the short term, but the potential damage if anyone found out far outweighs that slight benefit. Firstly, the president has no reason to run from his foreign policy record. Far from it. Although many conservatives complain about the president “spiking the football” with the death of Osama bin Laden, the fact remains that it was an achievement. Navy SEAL Team 6 carried out the actual operation, but they never would have been able to in the first place were it not for the president restructuring how national security decisions are made, nor would they have been authorized to go in had the president not rejected the advice of many of his most trusted counselors, including Vice President Joe Biden. President Obama has ordered a record number of drone strikes, helped Israel create a computer virus called “Stuxnet” that slowed down Iran’s nuclear weapons program, ended the war in Iraq, put more boots on the ground in Afghanistan and set a responsible plan for withdrawal there. These are only a few of his many accomplishments. If anything, President Obama’s strongest performance during his administration has been in the fields of national security and foreign policy, and looking weak on this one point would not seriously diminish the overall impact of that performance.

Another reason such blatant deception for political purposes would not have made sense is that it would inevitably be discovered. Today’s news media is drawn to anything sensational. They have a massive apparatus for both discovering and manufacturing stories. Any breach of national security, especially in an election season, is sure to receive increased scrutiny. With that in mind, the president had to have known that any alternative explanations put forward for the event would be debunked, and that the untruth would have a negative effect on the public’s perception of their safety under the president. Yet, he lied anyway.

Love him or hate him, the president is a really smart guy. There is a reason he hid the truth from us. You could just say that you don’t trust the president and chalk it all up to political scheming. Or you could take the less cynical but more realistic view that the reason the administration’s actions don’t make sense given what we know is that we probably just don’t know enough. That the government lies about national security should not be shocking. It shouldn’t be encouraged—the government should be as truthful as possible—but it’s also occasionally necessary in order to protect the American people. I’m willing to bet that the president withheld the information, not out of some misguided attempt to pull a fast one on voters, but rather to ensure our national security. There are any number of reasons one could invent—perhaps there was a counterstrike that depended on the element of surprise (after all, if even the enemy’s commander-in-chief doesn’t think that you’re responsible, why bother protecting yourself against a counterstrike?) or perhaps there would have been a local popularity bump for al-Qaida in Libya had we immediately given them credit for a successful attack on the United States. These speculations are unfounded, but no more unfounded and a lot more likely than allegations of lying for political gain. Let’s say we give the president the benefit of the doubt. The only thing without nuance in a situation like this is that on Sept. 11 in Benghazi, Libya, a tragedy occurred. Four Americans lost their lives. What had happened—who had died—it was absolutely wrong.