Monday was one of those days I really missed being in a daily newspaper newsroom.

If journalism is, as has been said, the first rough draft of history, then a day like Monday is when a reporter feels that most keenly.

Now, had I been working for most dailies, it’s not like I would have been sent screaming off to Pakistan in the company jet. I might have been working on some sort of local angle, getting reaction from this or that person, exploiting any kind of local aspect to the story I – or one of my editors – could come up with.

But on a historic day like the one where they announced they’d killed bin Laden, the energy in a newsroom is something to experience. It’s why those of us who are in this business go into it. You’re on the cutting edge of the most important reality in the world at that moment. You’re going to find out everything faster than anybody, except those on the actual scene. When it comes time to do the work, you and all your co-workers are hitting on all cylinders. I used to love to watch the late Terry DeVine, when he was my editor, when a big story hit; Terry had been a Marine sergeant in Vietnam and when something big went down the old non-com in him oozed from every pore. He’d be barking out orders, deploying his troops, and it was a gas. It was one of those times when life is like a movie.

The dirty little secret, though, is that that feeling happens even on tragic days. I was in the newsroom on 9/11 and, horrible and tragic as that day was – and those words don’t even begin to describe it – that feeling of energy and excitement was part of it. I don’t apologize for that, but I’m not particularly proud of it either. It is what it is, and those of us who report the news are what we are. The only good part of that is that reporters in that situation work extra-hard, because not only are they writing the first draft of history, they also need to make sure they’re not a source of misinformation. After all, especially with the Internet, enough of that gets out anyway.

It’ll be interesting to watch the follow-up coverage over the next few weeks. It’ll be particularly interesting when the Monday-morning quarterbacking starts.

It’s hard to imagine a better outcome than seeing bin Laden thoroughly ventilated, but there is going to be no shortage of know-it-all gasbags who will try to poke holes in what is probably the single greatest accomplishment of the Obama presidency so far.

I expect there will be two kinds of those.

The first will be liberal wimps, the kind of people who make me embarrassed to be a progressive. They’ll whine because they’ll say we should’ve taken him alive, he deserved a trial, it was wrong to just kill him, yadda, yadda, yadda.

I have to admit, there’s a small part of me that was disturbed that so many of us – me included – felt so good that bin Laden ate some lead. The human appetite for vengeance is not an attractive quality. It just shouldn’t feel so damn good.

But don’t misunderstand me. I think providing hell with one less vacancy was a fine thing. Nobody on earth deserved to die more than bin Laden.

That’s why I’m not sure I buy any assertion that the Navy SEALs’ orders were to capture or kill. Even if they were, the phrase “capture or kill” was probably followed by “wink, wink.”

From a practical standpoint, the cost of taking him alive would’ve just been too monstrous, and I’m not just talking financially. There is that, though; can you imagine how much it would have cost to keep him secure – hell, living – until an eventual trial, which would’ve been years off?

But what’s worse is that had the U.S. held a living bin Laden, literally every American citizen on the planet would have had a big ol’ target painted on his or her back. His minions would have stopped at absolutely nothing to free him. The death toll could have made 9/11 look like a minor traffic accident.

No, you don’t keep a rabid dog around and hope it gets better. You put it down.

The second bunch of second-guessers will be right-wingers, who will find some tortured rationale for saying Obama blew it. These are people to whom the truth means nothing and making the president look bad means everything. If Obama found a cure for death, they’d complain that he only did it to put morticians out of business.

I suppose Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity and the rest of the scum club will scream loud and long that the hunt for bin Laden began under George W. Bush, that all this was only the endgame of something Bush started, more yadda, yadda, yadda. Of course, what the dittoheads will be conveniently forgetting is that it somehow took Obama less than three years to do what Bush couldn’t do in seven. And that for all the Bush Administration’s tough talk and tendency to waste lives in pointless wars, the guy who finally cleared up at least one big part of the problem was the guy who simply inherited the mess Bush left behind.

So even if it doesn’t feel entirely right on some level, let us celebrate what happened earlier this week – and the incredibly brave and competent people who got into that Pakistani building and made it happen (one thing we can be unrestrainedly joyful about is that they suffered no casualties). Some other murderous jerk will take bin Laden’s place, but for once, America rid the world of a person who was nothing less than evil.