It is not usually the position of a comedy blog to comment upon tragic events. The string of deaths in the last few weeks almost entirely avoided falling under that umbrella because of the sideshows that swirled around them. Before Michael Jackson’s body was even remotely cold, the office was buzzing with an official list of Too Soon jokes. The same was true of Ed McMahon, Farrah Fawcett, and Billy Mays.

So when Steve McNair was found dead in a Nashville apartment on the fourth of July, the natural instinct is to find something to write about. It look a good twenty four hours to figure out exactly what that was going to be. As information trickled out from behind the yellow tape, it became abundantly clear what the commentary needed to be.

I don’t need every Why.

Steve McNair was a rare kind of superstar; a league MVP who was never considered a Hall of Fame quarterback. An incredible athlete in college who paved the way for small school starters like Tony Romo, Joe Flacco, and Daunte Culpepper to get a good look in the pros. A guy who was so legendarily tough that he played as long as his body would allow him to literally stand. Our fantasy football-mad journalists and HOF voters could never bring themselves to talk about him as one of the best quarterbacks in the league because his talent didn’t result in big numbers. Sure, now the ESPN buzzards are asking if he’s a HOF candidate, and the intelligent members of the press have to softly say no.

He was half a yard away from winning a Super Bowl and is as synonymous with the Tennessee Titans as Ray Lewis is with the Ravens, Brett Favre is/was with the Packers, and Jerome Bettis was with the Steelers. Even when he left the team for his turncoat years in Baltimore, the Titans fans never once held it against him. Even Baltimore fans avoided illusions: McNair was still a Titan who happened to play for the Ravens. Nashville will and should build a statue of the guy who made their team theirs.

Once we find out why he was killed, we should just leave it at that.

Our TMZ-spiked brains hunger so desperately for information that we don’t care how and where it takes us, what it does to history and our memories. Do we really want to know if McNair was involved in shady criminal activity? Do Nashville fans really need to find out if the other victim in the crime was his girlfriend? What does that accomplish exactly?

His actions on the football field are indeed the subject of public scrutiny, but his personal life is not.

The south is different than the rest of the country. Having gone through the civil rights clashes, it’s far more progressive than everyone else would care to realize; you’re more likely to find Klan members in Pennsylvania than Nashville. The result is a series of air-tight communities. It’s really the only place left in the country where people let each other mind their own business. Maybe it’s because the communities that share so much with each other know when to leave certain things unturned. The sheriff under constant barrage by Disney employees did his best to keep the lid on the circumstances of McNair’s company.

Millions of football fans in and outside of Nashville want to know why McNair was murdered this weekend. It is indeed the most important question, as is often stressed in this blog. And indeed the answer should be made public to bring his murderers to justice. But that isn’t the juicy part of the story is it? The media is instead asking loudly why Steve McNair was in an apartment with a 20 year old woman who isn’t his wife?

The real question is, why do we need to know?