This LZ Granderson piece should have appeared in the Onion, but instead it ran on CNN’s website. He actually compares efforts to get to the bottom of Operation Fast and Furious to the public’s desire to know about the “pregnancies and marriages of D-list celebrities.”

By allowing guns to infiltrate Mexico’s drug cartel, we thought we could trace them up the ladder to the leaders. Take off the head and the body dies. As for the innocent people who lost their lives? Collateral damage. That’s the uncomfortable backstory to this scandal. And there are likely other operations like it in our nation’s history that we don’t even have a clue about.

And maybe it’s better for us not to be so nosy, not to know everything because, to paraphrase the famous line from the movie “A Few Good Men,” many of us won’t be able to handle the truth.

First, these are odd ideas about government accountability and the flow of information coming from a journalist. But the point of the Fast and Furious investigation isn’t to leak national security secrets, which most of us accept are legitimate. It is to determine who was responsible for an operation that endangered national security and innocent lives so we can hold them accountable. Congressional oversight of the executive branch is as much a part of our constitutional design as the government’s inherent power to secure the country.