The clunker of a job growth report that the Labor Department published Friday morning is telling us something we should have already suspected.

Specifically, that recent blockbuster readings on U.S. job creation were a little too good to be true. American employers, while still adding to their payrolls, have not been on the epic hiring spree that previous reports had suggested.

So while the mere 20,000 jobs added in February (the lowest number since September 2017) is a big disappointment — compared both with what economists had forecast and with recent hiring numbers — it can be seen as a corrective to some of the more buoyant possibilities suggested by the same data series in late 2018 and January 2019.