On Monday, the Capitol Police admitted what the rest of the reality-based world already knew: The officer who shot Jan. 6 insurrectionist Ashli Babbitt as she tried to barrel through a broken window in the Capitol building did nothing wrong. Four months after the Justice Department decided against prosecuting the cop, an internal Capitol Police review not only found that the officer didn’t violate internal policy but that his actions almost certainly saved the lives of lawmakers and staffers.

Hours after that decision came down, The Los Angeles Times columnist and former editorial page editor Nicholas Goldberg went further. He argued that by shooting Babbitt, that cop might have very well kept the insurrection from spiraling completely out of control. If you can’t get through the paywall, Yahoo! News has Goldberg’s column mirrored here.

Hours after the officer’s formal exoneration was made public, Goldberg pulled up the video of Babbitt’s final moments. What he saw, to his mind—and to the minds of just about everyone who doesn’t have a MAGA hat glued to their head—put the lie to the recent efforts among the deplorables to make Babbitt a martyr.

By now, you know that Donald Trump and his most diehard supporters have branded Babbitt’s death as manslaughter at best and murder at worst. But as Goldberg notes, the video shows anything but a homicide. For starters, Babbitt was front and center in a particularly intimidating moment during the insurrection.

The crowd is surging. It’s at the doors. “F— the blue!” can be heard. People are bashing at the glass panels on the doors with sticks and flagpoles. Several police officers are doing their best to hold back an entire crowd, but it seems like a losing battle. “Break it down,” yells the crowd.

At the same time, a Capitol Police lieutenant is pointing his gun at the mob—as Goldberg puts it, “an unmistakable warning to stay back.” Babbitt would have almost certainly recognized from her Air Force days when she served as a security guard.

Instead, as we now know, Babbitt got two of her fellow “patriots” to boost her through a broken window in the Speaker’s Lobby. Just as she barrels through, a single shot goes off, and Babbitt falls to the floor—as we now know, mortally wounded.

Goldberg points out that several lawmakers were visible on the other side of that door. That led him to this stark conclusion—had Babbitt made it through, it would have been “inevitable” that the mob behind her would have followed her. His “normal human instinct” led him to draw a further conclusion.

Could the mob possibly have been stopped without Babbitt’s death? Maybe. Perhaps there was a way to have avoided deadly force. But it’s not clear to me what that way would have been — and it is clear that if Babbitt had gone through that doorway, an out-of-control situation would have deteriorated further.

The closest thing to raw footage I’ve been able to find is from indicted insurrectionist John “Jayden X” Sullivan and uploaded to Spain’s El Pais. (Embedding isn’t possible because it’s age-restricted.) It’s hard not to agree with Goldberg—that cop not only prevented the horror of Jan. 6 from spiraling out of control but may have very well saved the republic.

Due in part to the likes of Donald Trump, Paul Gosar, and other public and media figures irately demanding it, Capitol Police have not released the officer’s name. At considerable risk to his safety, the officer will reveal his identity for the first time in a Thursday night interview with NBC News’ Lester Holt. Hopefully, we can get a more accurate glimpse of what he saw that day—and finally knock down, once and for all, any talk of Babbitt being a martyr.