Do Reince Priebus and Mitt Romney understand what Christopher Stevens built—what he was still building, when he was killed last night in Benghazi, alongside three of his colleagues? He had a career of service, as a diplomat in Libya, during its recent war, in Saudi Arabia, Syria, and Israel, and stretching back to days in the Peace Corps, when he stood in a classroom in Morocco's High Atlas mountains, teaching English and representing America. Hillary Clinton, remembering him at the State Department on Wednesday morning, said that Stevens “won friends for America in distant places and made other people’s hopes his own.” She said that there were Libyans on the scene who tried to save him. He was fifty-two.

But on Tuesday night, after Stevens had been killed, but before his name had been released to the press, the Republican Party treated him as a prop, an instrument in the assembly of a cheap and false political attack. (John Cassidy has a timeline of the statements.) It was about an hour before midnight on September 11th, of all days, when Priebus tweeted this:

Obama sympathizes with attackers in Egypt. Sad and pathetic.

This was not true. Neither was it true, as Romney said even before Priebus’s tweet, that the Obama Administration’s first response was “to sympathize” with the killers. Romney called this “disgraceful”; what does he call the political distortion of the deaths of four diplomats who travelled to serve in a dangerous place? (CNN reported that they died of smoke inhalation after assailants with R.P.G.’s set the consulate on fire.) And what does Romney consider a lie? His statement this morning, while offering condolences, pressed the blame on Obama and scrambled the timeline of our Cairo Embassy’s statements. Priebus tweeted that out, too, along with prayers for the victims.

This is not simply a matter of “politicizing” tragedy; often, tragedy is political, and it is more than fair to recognize that. But the dead are owed at least two things: honesty and a recognition of their distinctive humanity. Also, justice—something Obama promised in a press conference this morning. One shouldn’t ignore politics, but one should use it to illuminate the dimensions, rather than to subsume the victims in unrecognizable, and mendaciously drawn, cartoons.

One aspect of the story that Republicans tell about Obama—that he has somehow “apologized” for America, a line Romney has repeated incessantly but that PolitiFact rated false—seems to have tempted them into snatching at the attacks in Cairo and Benghazi. But what kept them from realizing what they were doing? It is remarkable that news that a career diplomat was dead failed to set off any alarms, or encourage reflection. That is true even if Stevens’s thumbnail description—another government employee—failed to resonate with any of the sympathies that have been set up as distinctly Republican. (And one hopes that this was not the case.) But the fixation on slogans (“No apologies!”; “We built that!”) does seem to have distracted the G.O.P. and, in this case, led it to an unwise and harmful place.

Stevens was a builder, too, and so were his three colleagues, for whom flags are flying at half staff today. We are embedded in communities, international and domestic, that are sustained with efforts like theirs. When President Obama came out and spoke, he only named one of the other victims—the families of two were still being informed—Sean Smith, an information officer, who had two children, a girl named Samantha and a boy named Nathan. Wired’s Danger Room blog noted that Smith, in addition to having served in the Air Force and several foreign embassies, “when gaming with EVE Online guild Goonswarm...was a popular figure known as ‘Vile Rat,’ and alternately as ‘Vilerat’ while volunteering as a moderator at the internet community Something Awful.” This morning, the guild director, known as Mittani, put up a heartbroken post, which included a message from Smith, written Tuesday, with the phrase “assuming we don’t die tonight.” For his part, the director wrote,

If you play this stupid game, you may not realize it, but you play in a galaxy created in large part by Vile Rat’s talent as a diplomat.

Smith helped build that, too. It is a place, and not the only one, where he will be missed.

Read Jon Lee Anderson on the attacks in Benghazi and Cairo, and Amy Davidson on the political memorials of 9/11.

Photograph of J. Christopher Stevens/U.S. Department of State.