There are some things I absolutely love about this season of The Wire.

The acting continues to be spectacular. The newsroom scenes so real, particularly on all the little stuff. The storyline compelling. And Omar and Marlo? Their storylines, individually and intertwined, are spectacular this season.

But the whole McNulty fake serial killer storyline just rubs me the wrong way. If there’s anything The Wire has suffered from in the past, it’s been its extreme realism. This is just so incredibly unbelievable that it’s begun to turn The Wire from quasi-documentary into just really well-done cop drama. And I have to admit that I hate seeing a newspaper being suckered in on a story that is false (and that part isn’t even Templeton’s fault!). Though, as a newspaper editor, I also have to admit that the aftermath of exposing how there was no serial killer will be one spectacular story in and of itself, so…

Don’t get me wrong. I still love The Wire and look forward to it each week. There’s only three episodes left, dammit, but at least my boss won’t get to watch the finale a week before me (HBO has been airing each episode the Monday before its official air date via HBO on Demand).

Anyway, now that I’ve gotten that off my chest, I’ve gotta admit that last night’s episode was great.

First off, we had Clay Davis. The state’s attorney was in totally over his head. Refusing to get the U.S. Attorneys office involved just because he wanted the collar will prove to be his undoing. Of course, they still have Lester’s “head shot,” the illegal home loan the U.S. Attorney could use in federal court that’s akin to Al Capone being taken down for tax evasion.

Davis was absolutely spectacular on the stand. And his explanation was plausible enough that it showed the state attorney’s office hadn’t actually proven that he’d actually lined his own pockets. They didn’t turn up any big purchases, expensive trips, offshore accounts. They just showed that the money went into his account and then went out.  The jury really didn’t have any choice but to acquit, given the evidence.

Then we head on over to Omar land, and when he put the gun to Michael and expressed to the boys on the corner that they’d better let Marlo know that Omar’s out there and killed his boy and wants to see him.

Omar’s on a tear. Who knew that a guy who can (let’s face it now) hardly even walk could kill Marlo’s muscle, tear up a stash house and come up on a whole group of corner boys and hold them momentary hostage? Omar’s MAD. And Michael thought he was a dead man. He thought Omar was going to make him for being in the condo that night, shooting at him, for sure. He was, in a word, SCARED.

Bunk, meanwhile, has been doing some incredible police work. He’s starting to make some headway into the murder of Bug’s father and Michael’s connection to that and to Marlo’s gang. If he can somehow even link them to Bug’s dad’s murder, it’s something. All those people found in the vacants around the city will be avenged, even just a little bit.

But Bunk is beyond ticked at McNulty and Lester. Now that the redball’s started rolling, nothing’s getting in its way. And as annoyed as Landsman was at the start by all the attention being paid to McNulty, he’s actually excited, it seems, that real, honest-to-god police work is being done for a change. Cops are getting to be cops again, and even Landsman can’t help but be swept up by it.

And McNulty’s like Robin Hood, handing out OT and expenses to every cop on the homicide squad who needs just two days, just three men, just thismuchmore in order to catch the bad guy/girl on their open case. I can’t blame him. And you know that none of the others is going to rat him out, because he’s the goose that laid the golden egg (all sorts of fairy story/legend references here today!), but it’s gotta slip at some point when everyone starts solving their cases. Especially because they’ll be solving them when they’re supposedly working on the big serial killer case.

You’ve also got to wonder what these cops are thinking about the serial killer; if it’s such a big case, how come McNulty doesn’t actually need any help? Except Kima, who he feels totally guilty about giving any work to because he knows she has a legit triple she could be chasing down.

Speaking of Kima, ya hadda love the urban version of “Goodnight Moon” she recited with her little guy as they sat on the windowsill in her apartment. Though I’ve gotta say this —  I’ve put together lots of Ikea furniture and it’s really not that complicated.

And so we come, once again, to the newsroom.

Gus doesn’t like the purple prose permeating Templeton’s first-person piece. Templeton’s writing as if he’s spent weeks living among the homeless when in fact, he didn’t even spend a night under the overpass (and everyone thinks he actually did). Of course, it’s the type of writing that Gus’ higher-ups looove and they’ll take the edit on this one if Gus doesn’t want to. Gus knows that’s the best he’s gonna get, and takes it. Sometimes you just have to stand up for your principles, but accept that you’re not going to win the fight.

The newsroom meeting where they talked about how they were going to own this serial killer story rang true. Most of the biggest newsroom story meetings I’ve attended have been out in the middle of the newsroom, an editor pointing out who’s gonna do what. Election meetings, especially.

And didn’t you just want to kiss Bubbles for being so helpful to that one reporter, Mike Fletcher? I swear, every once in a while on the job, you run into someone who basically takes pity on you for being a reporter and helps you find the people you actually need to speak to. As journalists, we know a little about a lot of things, but a lot about very little at all.

Hadda laugh, by the way, when Templeton, all ashen, declares the killer had just called him. And then remembers, as an afterthought, to add, “Again.”

Meanwhile, fellow editor Rebecca Corbett (the one who opined, “Huh” when faced with the unnamed kid outside Orioles stadium on opening day) and Gus discuss the throwaway scholarship story that Templeton did that someone has said was a scam. The paper got taken in, they believe, but they can’t prove it. All they do know is that if a reporter lies to get out of a correction, what else might he be lying about.

See, thing is, some reporters just refuse to be wrong. Even when they are. I knew of a reporter many years and a couple papers ago whose archived stories couldn’t be trusted. One of the reporter’s closest friends told me that reporter refused to ever write corrections, so you were risking errors by taking what ordinarily would be boilerplate, basic background information out of her past articles.

Sure, everything might be absolutely correct in that article. But it also might not be. And you never knew which it’d be.

Now, most reporters I know hate corrections as much as the one who refused to write them. But they write them because it just completely defeats the purpose of writing an article in the first place if you’re just going to get it wrong.

I trust a paper with a healthy corrections column each day over one that only very occasionally prints one. It’s impossible to put a paper out each day without making a few, ranging from a simple typo to my personal recent favorite, a headline that spelled the presidential candidates’ last name “O’Bama.” (I kid you not. Trust me, everyone felt REALLY stupid.)

My worst correction ever involved a joint City Council/Planning Board meeting in Apache Junction, Ariz. I worked the Saturday day shift and they were holding the meeting to discuss I don’t even remember what. I was extremely new to the paper and the region (Phoenix metro area) and I made an absolutely asinine mistake.

All the officials were sitting together around a U-shaped table. I recognized a couple of their names and realized that one of the guys over on the left was a councilman and someone on the right was on the Planning Board. So, I figured, the Council members were on the left, Planning Board on the right. They all had nameplates, so I spelled everyone’s name right at least.

Honestly, I meant to check who was who after the meeting and couldn’t tell you today, more than a decade later, why I didn’t. I could have looked them up in our archives, maybe (though we didn’t cover Apache Junction that much, so that might not have helped). I didn’t do that, either. So in quoting some of the officials, I got their affiliations wrong. Made me look stupid and the paper like it didn’t know what it was doing.

Totally mortified and embarrassed, I told my immediate editor; she told me I needed to tell the managing editor. I swallowed and went into his office. I lucked out, as he was in a good mood, and he told me the story of his worst correction ever.

I never, however, made a mistake that lame again. That’s part of what’s good about running corrections: Those who make mistakes are less bound to make more, to torture a cliche.

All this is by way of saying that there’d be far less suspicion of Templeton if he just ‘fessed up to being taken by the scholarship woman. By pretending he did nothing wrong, he just makes everyone else suspicious.

By the way, didja catch that cameo of Munch in the cop bar? Nice wink to Homicide: Life on the Street.