As you’ve probably read elsewhere, Adrian Peterson started in Minnesota’s 35-10 loss to Carolina, just 2 days after the Vikings RB learned his two-year old son had died as the result of a brutal beating. Though the sensitive, if not the sensible amongst us would be loathe to use such an tragedy as a means to take repeated shots at AP’s off-the-field misadventures, if not very reluctant to judge Peterson’s decision to play, rest assured the New York Post’s Phil Mushnick is neither sensible or sensitive in this instance. Not only is Phil far from hesitant in calling Peterson’s vow to play, “sickening”, but actually goes so far as to suggest the 5 time Pro Bowler is to blame for his son’s killing.

Me? I’d be fighting for breath, my knees weak with grief, demanding to know why, who, how. Then, I suspect, I’d seethe with rage, swearing retribution. I even think I’d take off a day or two from work. Maybe a week.

The suspect in the beating murder of Peterson’s 2-year-old is the boyfriend of Peterson’s “baby mama” — now the casual, flippant, detestable and common buzz-phrase for absentee, wham-bam fatherhood.

The accused, Joseph Patterson, previously was hit with domestic assault and abuse charges.

With his resources, how could Peterson, the NFL’s MVP, have allowed his son to remain in such an environment? Did he not know, or not care? Or not care to know? Or not know to care?

Peterson couldn’t have provided his son a better life, a longer life?

Money can’t buy love, but having signed a $96 million deal, he could not have provided his child — apparently his second from a “baby mama” — a safe home?

But given Peterson’s father did hard time for drug money laundering maybe we’re both stuck with the values in which we were born, raised.

Supposedly one of the advantages of writing a column a few times a week rather than tweeting or yelling on sports radio all day long is that with the help of an editor and/or your own self-control, an author might resist the compulsion to submit the ugliest, most vicious thought that popped into his or her head. That Peterson has a handful of minor scrapes with the law, that his father’s a convicted felon, is rather poor justification for claiming he’s all but an accessory to murder, or that his grief isn’t genuine.

Phil is a very occasional, though not entirely enthusiastic reader of CSTB, and as such, perhaps he or someone else at the paper would be kind enough to furnish his old columns in he castigated Brett Favre for playing immediately following his father’s death. Or maybe we can see the Post column in which Phil pointed a finger at Andy Reid over the former Eagles head coach failing to prevent his son’s fatal heroin overdose. Because I would absolutely hate to ever imply that a thoughtful, non-trolling journalist like Phil Mushnick was holding Adrian Peterson to a ridiculous, arbitrary standard.