The sub thrower has been cast by opponents of Trump’s takeover of D.C. law enforcement as a hero with a hero, the profane voice of the incensed masses.

Reporters are forever lamenting how they are often misled when they feel they must chase down events that “went viral” on the internet and probe them in search of a profundity that, more often than not, just isn’t there. The man who was captured on video on Wednesday night, rocketing a Subway sandwich at a Customs and Border Protection officer, might be the exception that proves the rule.

New York Times reporter Nicholas Bogel-Burroughs stuck to the script in his workmanlike recounting of the details of the hoagie assault. The scene opens with a seemingly inebriated man in a salmon-pink shirt and shorts (since identified as Sean Dunn, 37) hectoring the officers tasked by Donald Trump with supplementing Washington, D.C.’s police forces. He peppers them with insults and profanity, but the officers saunter off indifferently. “Shame!” he screams, still clutching his foot-long. “Shame!” Unsatisfied with the lack of perturbation he caused, Dunn approaches the officers again — shouting profanity inches from their faces and making hostile gestures.

“Stop the drama,” one onlooker shouts as Dunn proceeds to make a spectacle of himself in an intersection. This presumably went on for some time — a jump cut in the footage elides at least some of the gratuitous altercation — but Dunn just cannot provoke a response. It was only when Dunn hurled his sub sandwich at full force directly into CBP Agent Gregory Larimore’s chest that the assailant was chased down, subdued, and arrested.

“The video has become emblematic of how some Washington residents feel about Mr. Trump’s injection of federal law enforcement officers into the city’s streets,” Bogel-Burroughs observed. After all, the assault occurred after about 100 protesters generated wildly disproportionate coverage in the press for heckling law enforcement at a Northwest D.C. vehicle checkpoint operated by the Department of Homeland Security. The sub thrower has been cast by opponents of Trump’s takeover of D.C. law enforcement as a hero with a hero, the profane voice of the incensed masses.

There is an element of subversion to the coverage of this somewhat comical incident. It comes after several days in which congressional Democrats and their allies in media questioned the logic of Trump’s edict, given the downward trajectory of the city’s crime rates. The Democratic Party’s more intemperate voices have sought to convey the impression that the city is, more or less, safe. Boosting the signal on this incident contributes to the impression these Democrats want to popularize: essentially, that federal officers and uniformed personnel have been frivolously deployed to contain what amounts to little more than criminal mischief. It is, therefore, coverage of crime in Washington that cheapens the crime issue. It is meant to advance the notion that lawlessness in D.C. is a figment of fevered right-wing imaginations.

But Dunn wasn’t just satisfying the phantoms that haunted his addled mind. He was performing for an audience — one that took great pleasure in both his harassment of these CBP agents and the peril in which he had put himself. There is an incentive structure there. It’s far more prevalent online than in the streets, but it exists. As NBC News reported in June, “a far-left online ecosystem that has proliferated in recent years” in which agitators “express contempt for peaceful resistance and glorify acts of violence.” If Dunn wasn’t a consumer of that sort of discourse, those who are have taken inspiration from his cartoonish but nevertheless actionable attack on law enforcement. There’s nothing funny about that.

And it turns out that Dunn worked for the Justice Department’s criminal division as an internal affairs specialist. He has been removed from that role by Attorney General Pam Bondi, who called Dunn “an example of the Deep State we have been up against for seven months as we work to refocus DOJ.” The reflexive default to the language of conspiracism is not at all helpful in this case — not unless you think there are tightly knit cells of would-be sub-throwers awaiting the signal to act. The facts as we know them are more unsettling than that. Dunn was, according to available accounts, a gainfully employed and productive citizen who, for whatever reason, took leave of his senses and assaulted an officer.

Maybe this episode is a one-off — a mere curiosity that deserves none of the attention it has generated from both sides of the fracas over Trump’s intervention in Washington, D.C. That is likely. If there is a deeper meaning here, however, it seems less reflective of the simmering hostility toward federal law enforcement officers in D.C. and more a warning of what political radicalization can lead those with impaired judgment to do. Today, the weapon was a sandwich. It may be something worse tomorrow.