It didn’t take long for Der Speigel & Co. to determine who the real culprit behind the senseless shooting of Arizona Rep. Gabrielle Gifford is (resulting in six deaths and nineteen injuries): Sarah Palin.

It doesn’t seem to be of any importance that the suspected shooter prepared Internet videos filled with rambling statements on topics like mind control or that his classmates wondered if he might not be on hallucinogens or that “as I knew him, he was left wing, quite liberal and oddly obsessed with the 2012 prophecy” or that all of this is “consistent with the delusions produced by a psychotic illness like schizophrenia.”

The real telling stuff that hard-hitting investigative reporters have dug up here is that Sarah Palin has criticized Gifford’s politics in the past and even went as far as to place a map on her “Political Action Committee” website page in which voting districts that had supported Obama’s health reform were marked with “crosshairs.”

How sinister, or something. And how much more ridiculous can you get than that?

“It almost seemed like he was on his own planet, because his comments would have nothing to do with what we were talking about.”