Mark Steyn on the Beltway sniper.

A few days ago, I caught the tail end of a news bulletin on how the police had at last put together a “composite.” I was impressed. But it turned out to be a composite not of the suspect but of his vehicle, a Chevy Astro. Why do you need a composite of a van? Any old Chevrolet dealer can give you a full-colour glossy brochure. Did the van have a prominent mole on its passenger-side door? A cleft windscreen? Did they do a computer projection of what the Astro would like if it grew a beard? As it turned out, when the “composite” was eventually released, it was a perfectly ordinary Astro. But the bigger a deal the cops made of the suspect’s vehicle the more you noticed how little they had to say about the suspect. The only detail — the description of him by certain witnesses as “olive-skinned” — was leaked, and Montgomery County’s Chief of Police, Charles Moose, was none too happy about it.

We do know one thing, though: Whether or not it’s Islamic terrorism, it’s terrorism. As The New York Times reported, “He seems to be killing to create public fear rather than to settle a grudge or inflict pain on his victims. ‘I’ve just never seen a serial killer whose motivation seems to be to create terror in the community rather than to see his individual victims suffer,’ said James Alan Fox, a professor of criminal justice at Northeastern University in Boston who has written books on serial killers.” He’s never seen a serial killer do that because that’s not what serial killers do: It’s what terrorists do. If TV’s round-the-clock psychological profiling by the experts on troubled loners seems weirdly mismatched, it’s because it’s like bringing in the tennis commentators to do the Stanley Cup.