The Obama campaign chose to release its controversial attack “ad” about the killing of Osama bin Laden last Friday—a day when the news cycle would otherwise have been dominated by negative economic tidings: the Commerce Department’s announcement that G.D.P. growth in the first quarter slowed to close to two per cent. If the intention was to divert attention onto other matters, and there was surely some of that, it succeeded brilliantly. Today’s anniversary of the raid on bin Laden’s compound in Abbottabad was always going to be newsworthy. But the row over the campaign ad, and whether Mitt Romney would have approved the raid, has transformed a one-off story into a political dustup that is now in its fourth day.

For David Axelrod and the rest of Team Obama, things could hardly have worked out better. For the Romney campaign, it is another damaging diversion, and the boys in Beantown have only themselves to blame. Their rivals in Chicago set a trap for them, and they walked right into it. Rather than ignoring the ad, or dismissing it quickly and moving onto other topics less favorable to Obama, the Romney campaign decided to stand and fight on ground it cannot hope to win.

It is hardly surprising that the Obama campaign would seek to draw attention to the anniversary and exploit it for maximum advantage. In Obama’s three and a bit years in office, the clinical (and quite possibly unlawful) killing of bin Laden stands out as Obama’s one action that Americans of both parties are willing to applaud. Even Dick Cheney praised the President for sending in the Navy SEALs against the advice of some of his colleagues. (“I give him high marks for making that decision,” Cheney told Fox News, a few days after the raid.) It is also no surprise that the Obama campaign enlisted the help of Bill Clinton, who appears in the spot, which is entitled “One Chance,” praising the President’s resolve in ordering the attack, or that it would seek to contrast Obama’s decisiveness with Romney’s statements on the subject.

“Nobody can make that decision for you,” Clinton intones to the camera. “Suppose the Navy SEALs went in there and it hadn’t been bin Laden. Suppose they had been captured or killed. The downside would have been horrible for him… He took the harder and the more honorable path…” The ad then changes tack, and a question appears on the screen: “Which path would Mitt Romney have taken?” This is followed by a sentence from a Reuters news story dated August, 2007: “Mitt Romney criticized Barack Obama for vowing to strike al-Qaeda targets inside Pakistan if necessary.” Then Wolf Blitzer is shown reading out a quote from Romney: “It’s not worth moving heaven and earth spending billions of dollars trying to catch one person.”

In leaving the impression that Romney wouldn’t have ordered the raid, there is no doubt that the Obama campaign selectively edited his words. As the Huffington Post’s Jon Ward pointed out yesterday, Romney didn’t actually rule out attacking targets in Pakistan. In an interview with George Stephanopoulos, on August 2, 2007, he said,

It’s wrong for a person running for the president of the United States to get on TV and say, “We’re going to go into your country unilaterally.” Of course, America always maintains our option to do whatever we think is in the best interests of America. But we don’t go out and say, “Ladies and gentlemen of Germany, if ever there was a problem in your country, we didn’t think you were doing the right thing, we reserve the right to come in and get them out.” We don’t say those things. We keep our options quiet.

The quote from Romney that the Obama ad references was taken from an interview he did with Liz Sidoti, an Associated Press reporter, in April, 2007. Here is the relevant part of the transcript: