A caller today chastised us for repeating false stories about the messy Bill Clinton-George W. Bush transition.

A front-page story on presidential transitions in today’s Post-Dispatch says of the Clinton-Bush transition: “The handoff proved somewhat less harmonious weeks later, when the Bush team arrived to find some minor office vandalism, including the purloined keyboard letter of the middle name of the incoming president. “

“The W’s were removed from keyboards in the executive office building of President Bill Clinton’s departing administration,” reports the story by Mark Silva of the Chicago Tribune.

Silva’s story says: “The two teams quickly patched up the delicate matter of vandalism, however.”

The reader who called us this morning says it never happened, that it “was made up by Karl Rove.”

It did happen, a GAO report found back then. But the degree of vandalism and hostility between transitions was exaggerated and/or greatly disputed in early reporting eight years ago.

My initial reaction to the caller’s complaint was that we should have provided more context to the Clinton-Bush reference, especially since it was used as the beginning imagery in Silva’s story.  But in looking at the back-and-forth that went on at the time, providing more details might have exaggerated its importance in today’s story.

Silva used the episode to show that transitions can be messy and mean-spirited. Seems like it accomplished that purpose.