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I won’t, I can’t say a bad word about Patricia Smith.

She lost her only child, U.S. Foreign Service information management officer Sean Smith, 34, in the Sept. 11, 2012, attack on the U.S. diplomatic compound in Benghazi, Libya.

I can barely imagine the depths of her grief and caldron of other emotions such a loss stirs in a parent or other loved one, and I was genuinely moved by the pain in her voice as she spoke Monday at the Republican National Convention. She seemed close to tears for most of the five minutes she spoke, and TV cutaway shots showed delegates in the arena quietly weeping.

I don’t fault Smith for saying, halfway through her speech, “I blame Hillary Clinton personally for the death of my son. That’s personally.”

Patricia Smith, mother of Benghazi victim Sean Smith, addresses the Republican National Convention on July 18, 2016, at Quicken Loans Arena in Cleveland, Ohio.
Patricia Smith, mother of Benghazi victim Sean Smith, addresses the Republican National Convention on July 18, 2016, at Quicken Loans Arena in Cleveland, Ohio.

Even though Smith is completely wrong.

Nine bipartisan congressional investigations into the circumstances surrounding the Benghazi attack, which occurred while Clinton was secretary of state, have failed to identify any wrongdoing or evidence of culpability on her part before and during the siege on the compound.

Republican hunger to pin the deaths of four Americans on Clinton has been protracted and palpable, yet at the conclusion of the most recent and comprehensive investigation last month, U.S. Rep. Trey Gowdy, R-S.C., chair of the House Select Committee on Benghazi, pointedly declined reporters’ invitations to blame Clinton or the White House for the loss of life.

Tragedy and anguish take our minds in many directions, not all of them rational. I had the same sort of empathy for Cindy Sheehan, also a grieving mother, who became an increasingly strident antiwar (and, at first, anti-Republican) activist following the death of her son Casey, 23, an Army soldier killed in 2004 in Iraq.

But Democrats never invited Sheehan to speak at a national convention; never gave the party’s official imprimatur to her harshest sentiments.

I will, I must, say many bad words about the GOP convention organizers.

They gave Smith an evening speaking slot and signed off on what amounted to a murder charge against the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee slightly more veiled than the statement she made just before the 2012 election, to the San Diego Union-Tribune, “I believe that (President Barack) Obama murdered my son.”

Sometimes convention speakers depart from their scripts, but Smith’s line “I blame Hillary Clinton personally for the death of my son” was in the text of her prepared remarks distributed in advance to the media.

Those remarks typically go through numerous layers of review, meaning that the GOP decided to exploit this woman’s grief and our natural sympathy for her to lob an unsubstantiated accusation that clear-headed, responsible speakers could not.

Criticizing a political foe for policy blunders and failures of oversight that result in death is standard political rhetoric — the protest chant “Bush lied, people died” regarding the invasion of Iraq is one recent example; challenges to Clinton’s support of U.S. intervention in Libya is another.

But dipping opponents’ hands in blood goes too far. And if Democrats have done it at previous conventions beneath my radar or if they plan to try to do it at their upcoming gathering, shame on them as well.

Though Smith’s final words from the stage — “Hillary for prison! She deserves to be in stripes!” — weren’t in her prepared remarks, they were a predictable and perhaps welcomed coda to her emotional presentation.

Smith is not only grieving, she’s angry. She claims — and claimed in her speech Monday — that Clinton lied to her in a private gathering on the day her son’s casket was returned to the United States, telling her that the attack was part of widespread protests over a YouTube video that Muslims found blasphemous and not an independently executed terrorist assault.

Clinton has denied this, and lengthy investigations of the claim by PolitiFact and The Washington Post’s Fact Checker were inconclusive. After interviewing many others who were present and reviewing the evolving accounts of those conversations in the press, both probes concluded that it’s hard to say with any confidence what Clinton said to Smith or even exactly what Clinton knew at the time.

Admittedly, lying to an anguished mother for political purposes, if that’s what Clinton did, is disgraceful. But it isn’t murder.

It’s also disgraceful for operatives to hide behind the pain of an anguished mother to lob false allegations for political purposes.

They should know better.

Twitter @EricZorn