One Saturday morning back in January 1991, I was working the sports desk here at the Democrat-Herald, helping to put out that afternoon’s paper — back when we had a Saturday afternoon edition and no Sunday paper; we longtime staffers refer to those times as the good old days — when one of my colleagues made a humorous yet poignant comment.

The Persian Gulf War was just under way, most of the U.S. only recently having gotten its first real exposure to Saddam Hussein, a reprehensible despot by any measure, regardless of your political or military leanings.

Anyway, that Saturday, as I slogged through high school basketball stories and boxscores, a colleague on the news side was editing that day’s police information and got to an item about a fatal car accident.

“Went off the road on Fish Hatchery Drive — why couldn’t something like that just happen to Saddam Hussein?” he asked.

It was funny — at least in a dark, newsroom comedy sort of way — yet I always felt he was at least partially serious and also that he had a point.

Here was a really evil guy, the worst of the worst, who had taken or ruined millions of lives. Would it be so bad just to hope his limo crashed on Baghdad’s equivalent of Fish Hatchery Drive? Or at the very least, to be  happy upon hearing that sort of news?

Myself, as a kid I was taught to oppose evil — my dad was a WWII vet — but also to forgive, to not hate or judge, to wish harm on no one, and to believe that where there’s life, there’s hope. And four decades later, I can’t really knock any of those teachings.

I’m not exactly Will Rogers, who never met a person he didn’t like, but I’m close. I like almost everybody, at least to the point where I can see people’s positives and get along with them if they make any effort at all to meet me halfway. I really do feel like most people are basically decent at a minimum.

But I will allow that I’ve encountered a small handful of folks whose consistently awful treatment of other people outstrips my ability to like them — and threatens as well my ability to feel bad about it if their car went off the road on Fish Hatchery Drive or Goldfish Farm Road or Independence Highway or anywhere else.

Part of me feels like its contrary to the notion of decency to look at anyone’s fatal mishap as justice, no matter what the person has done to that point … but part of me doesn’t.

Any thoughts on this?