The Gretna Police Department fired two officers Monday, just days after one of the officers posted a comment on social media that suggested U.S. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez should be shot.

The author of the Facebook post, Charlie Rispoli, and another officer who "liked" the post, Angelo Varisco, were both fired for violating the department's social-media policy, Gretna Police Chief Arthur Lawson announced at a press conference.

Rispoli had posted a fake news story about Ocasio-Cortez to his Facebook page Thursday and included a comment calling the New York Democrat “a vile idiot” and saying she “needs a round, and I don't mean the kind she used to serve" when she was a bartender.

Lawson said the incident "has been an embarrassment" to his department and that such comments by members of law enforcement were unacceptable.

"These officers have certainly acted in a manner which was unprofessional, alluding to a violent act to be conducted against a sitting U.S. (congresswoman), a member of our government," he said. "We are not going to tolerate that.”

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The comments quickly drew the attention of national media amid the broader controversy over racially charged remarks made by President Donald Trump about Ocasio-Cortez and three other minority congresswomen.

The four congresswomen — all U.S. citizens, three born here — were told by Trump last week to "go back and help fix the totally broken and crime infested places from which they came."

Ocasio-Cortez tweeted about the local incident for the first time Monday afternoon, saying, "This is Trump’s goal when he uses targeted language & threatens elected officials who don’t agree w/ his political agenda. It’s authoritarian behavior.

"The president is sowing violence. He’s creating an environment where people can get hurt & he claims plausible deniability."

Lawson's office was besieged by phone calls over the weekend, and the investigation into what Lawson called “a ripple in a pond that became a tidal wave” remains open as officials track down more information on the now-deleted Facebook post.

Because the post had been taken down, the department had to contact Facebook to see whether any other officers may have liked or commented on it, according to Lawson. Facebook had not responded to the request as of Monday afternoon.

Lawson said the incident was brought to the department's attention Friday. The first local newspaper story went online Saturday, and the story had been picked up by national news outlets by Sunday.

Rispoli was put on administrative leave without pay early Monday, just hours before Lawson announced his termination and the firing of Varisco.

Neither Rispoli, who had 14 years on the force, and Varisco, who had less than three years, had worked the streets as patrol officers, Lawson said. Both did security detail in the Jefferson Parish Governmental Building, which includes the 24th Judicial District Court.

Lawson said the department looked into arrests the two officers had made and found only two each, all taking place inside the courtroom. He said Varisco also had worked security at Gretna City Hall, and Rispoli most recently worked in the home incarceration program supervising people placed under house arrest.

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As he had Friday, Lawson on Monday noted the department has a social media policy that officers must sign and that he had distributed copies of a news story out of Philadelphia last month reporting that the police department there had taken 72 officers off the streets over Facebook posts that exhibited racism, misogyny and violence.

“With all of those efforts, something like this still happens,” he said. “It’s very disturbing. It shows a lack of the officer paying attention to what’s going on in the world around him.”

Rispoli did not respond to a request for comment; Varisco could not be located.

Lawson refused to release photos of the two officers. He repeated that he does not think the post constituted a legitimate threat.

He said he spoke to both officers, and described Rispoli as remorseful and as a typically mild-mannered person who made a bad decision “in the heat of the moment.”

He said he was mystified at how a story that was clearly marked as being untrue could have upset someone, though he said the veracity of the story doesn't affect what the appropriate punishment is.

"You see in social media where people don’t read what they’re reading and they don’t comprehend what they're reading," he said. "They take a caption and react, read a headline and react to it. It’s a shame, but it’s the world we’re living in now. It’s sad but it’s something we just can’t tolerate.”

Asked about the motivation of the website that printed the story, Lawson said, "I don’t know what their intent was. If (getting people fired) was their intent, it worked. It certainly took someone and exposed a weakness that they had and cost them their career — cost two people their careers. It’s sad.”

"It’s a tough lesson, but hopefully it’s a lesson learned, not only by our department, but other law enforcement agencies as well,” he said.