Laurel County, Ky.: Just like old days, I'm told to report to the principal's office!

That's what the sign on the door of Johnson Elementary School said: "ALL VISITORS MUST REPORT TO THE PRINCIPAL'S OFFICE."

Johnson Elementary is the school where Bill Sparkman worked part-time as an instructional assistant in an after-school program for about a decade.

Donna at the front desk of the Laurel County Public Library -- where I've been using their computers today -- gave me directions: Take a left on 192, go down to the light, turn left (west) on 80 and go back into town. Before you get to the railroad tracks, there will be an IGA store on your left. McWhorter Street is on the right, across from the IGA. Take McWhorter Street until it crosses the parkway, at which point it becomes McWhorter Road, and the school is a little more than a mile down, on the right.

The principal of the school is a tall, bespectacled man with jug ears named Tyler McWhorter, although he said he's not sure if the road was named for his family. McWhorter has only been at the school a couple of years and didn't know Sparkman. He gave me the cell-phone number of someone who could be more helpful.

Having figured out the computer set-up here at the library a bit better, I can now link Joseph Deal's article in Monday's London (Ky.) Sentinel-Echo, which I think may be the most important news story yet about the Sparkman case.

Joe Deal is a smart, tough, experienced journalist, a native of Wisconsin. Like most good newspapermen, Deal feels a real responsibility to his community and to the truth. It's important for people far away from eastern Kentucky to understand that misinformation from certain media outlets has resulted in the defamation of an entire community. But the entire 25,000 people of Clay County can't bring a class-action suit for libel, can they?

There seems to be a lot of craziness going around online lately. Brooke Shields is nude, Roman Polanski's been arrested, Gore Vidal is warning about "dictatorship," Bette Midler is talking "civil war," and there are even dangerous crackpots alleging that I'm somehow involved with Sarah Palin. (Let me make one thing perfectly clear to Dave Weigel: I did not have political relations with that governor, Mrs. Palin.)

When the going gets weird, the weird get going, and pretty soon I'm going to have to hit the road back up toward Washington. My wife's worried about me, down here with all these Kentucky women -- 19-year-old short-order cooks and 20-year-old journalists and so forth. Little Miss Attila suspects a "scam," a term that my Samoan attorney says might be considered defamatory per se.

As always, the vital question to ask is, "What Would Hunter S. Thompson Do?" And the blindingly obvious answer in this case is: Get the heck out of this library and go east on the parkway, very fast, before anyone even suspects I've gone.

Maybe I'll stop and talk to more sources -- Judge Garrison was at the Huddle House on Tuesday night, and gave me his cell-phone number -- and could possibly even make another post or two before I leave Kentucky. But I've done what I came here to do. I've got enough notes and pictures to lash together 10,000 words if I had to, and plenty of sources I can contact if this story heats up again, as it may at any moment. Let's see, if I head southeast toward Bristol, then hit I-81 . . .

Laurel County, Ky.: It's kind of hard to cover a homicide investigation . . .

. . . when the police aren't saying anything. On the one hand, I perfectly understand the concerns of law enforcement, who are conducting an important criminal investigation, and don't want to compromise the case.

Let's face it: Criminals can read newspapers, too. Although police haven't officially ruled out an accidental cause of death, this would be the most bizarre case of self-asphyxiation in history. So if somebody killed Sparkman, the killer is still out there somewhere.

For all I know, the killer is right here in the Laurel County Public Library, where I'm using this computer. That little old lady over there . . . well, she doesn't look suspicious, but you can never tell, here in Lower Glennbeckistan, where there are thousands upon thousands of Republicans.

The cops have to do their job, and reporters have to do our jobs, and I'm trying to be as responsible as possible about this story. I just had a brief meeting -- little more than a handshake, really -- with Joseph Deal, managing editor of the local London (Ky.) Sentinel-Echo., whose Monday article about the Sparkman case should be must-reading for anyone interested in this story.

Deal's article Monday was an attempt to clear up "misinformation" -- that's Kentucky State Police spokesman Don Trosper's word -- created by the Sept. 24 article that made this case a national sensation. The Sept. 24. story was clearly flawed, in more ways than one, but the problem is that law enforcement is saying so little about the investigation that nobody can tell exactly what is true or false.

Ergo, we don't even know what we don't know. This is when it's helpful to have a reporter on the scene who's also a "top Hayekian public intellectual," given F.A. Hayek's theories about the diffuse nature of information and the importance of unknown data.

BTW, this public library -- build in 2003 -- is large, beautiful and ultra-modern. However, the reason there are no links in this article is that they've blocked the "open new windows" function on there PC terminals, effectively rendering their computers useless for a blogger. Sigh.

There are other people and places I need to see here in Laurel County, which was where Sparkman lived. Ever since I arrived here, I've been struck by the fact that Sparkman's body was found more than 30 miles east of his home. Although he was employed part-time as a Census worker in Clay County, one of the things we don't know is whether he was actually working the day he disappeared.

By the way, Sparkman apparently disappeared Sept. 9, missed an appointment Sept. 10, and his body was found in the Hoskins Cemetery on Sept. 12. So that's a four-day time span that the police will have to examine very closely.

Will have more later. Ciao.