Note to John Monk: Enough already. And that’s from someone who fully supports the primary enforcement safety belt bill.

Mr. Monk, The State’s “News Columnist” (more on that later), has for months now offered the same argument, ad nauseam, about the debate over whether to give law enforcement officers the power to pull and ticket people for failing to buckle up.

That argument boils down to this: Glenn McConnell is killing people. This silly approach to a serious issue obscures the arguments that need to be focused on in order to pass the bill.

As someone who believes deeply in the importance of the news media, and especially newspapers, to public policy debates, I cringe when reading Mr. Monk’s simplistic attacks on Sen. McConnell.

That is not to defend Mr. McConnell’s position, with which I strongly disagree. His “personal freedom” argument is not even a close call in this case. Why? Because the economic impact of traffic deaths and injuries is enormous, and passed on to us all in the form of higher insurance rates and medical costs.

Further, when buckled up, a driver may be able to minimize or even prevent a crash as a result of remaining in place behind the wheel, in the process saving innocent people in other cars or his own.

Finally, the fact that we have a law that police can observe being broken but are prohibited from enforcing makes a mockery of the law itself. Anyone who values our system of laws should be offended by it.

Of course, it's a lot easier just to suggest Glenn McConnell is killing people, an approach that might best be described by Shakespeare's phrase, “full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.”

While you wouldn’t know it from reading Mr. Monk’s columns, the fact is that anyone who dies in a car crash in South Carolina while not wearing a safety belt was breaking the law to begin with. Yes, we have a law that requires wearing seat belts.

But rather than ridicule those who willingly break the law, Mr. Monk ridicules Sen. McConnell, hanging the deaths of these not-so-innocent victims around his neck.

The fact that those motorists chose to be personally irresponsible and violators of state law as well seems lost on Mr. Monk.

Indeed, he absolves those who fail to buckle up and directly blames Mr. McConnell when he writes, “As people continue to needlessly die on S.C. roads, Senator McConnell is delaying a vote on a strong seat belt law....”

That’s only the beginning. If you've read Mr. Monk's columns, you know he puts a negative spin on Sen. McConnell's position through the use of such phrases as “portrays himself in the tradition of America's Founding Fathers” and “statistics have little impact on McConnell.”

He also charges Sen. McConnell with making “a secret, backroom deal” to derail the bill. Imagine that — deals being made in the Legislature. I’m shocked!

In the end, the real problem with all this is that Mr. Monk is editorializing somewhere other than on the editorial pages. This apparently falls under the job description of “News Columnist,” seemingly a hybrid of editorial thunder grafted onto Jimmy Olsen’s notepad.

In any case, Mr. Monk, and only Mr. Monk, has reported on this story for The State. Allowing him to take an advocacy position is one thing, but offering no unbiased coverage of an issue is quite another.

Further, The State has presented Mr. Monk’s crusading columns not as opinion-driven stories but instead with the look of in-depth, investigative pieces. Several have been accompanied by flashy layouts, large graphics, dramatic photos and other design cues normally associated with major news stories and never associated with opinion pieces.

I urge Sen. McConnell to rethink his position on the primary enforcement safety belt bill. I also urge John Monk and The State to rethink how they are treating Sen. McConnell, their readers and their profession.

Mr. Fisher is president of Fisher Communications, a Columbia advertising and public relations firm that produced the “Highways or Dieways” and “Let ‘em work, let ‘em live” traffic safety campaigns.