Donald Trump’s decision to fire FBI director James Comey is an alarming, if characteristically incompetent, move by a president who seems to view even the smallest challenge to his power as unacceptable. At best, it’s an attempt to punish someone Trump sees as insufficiently loyal. At worst, it’s a clumsy and self-defeating attempt to cover up a crime.

Given the circumstances, it may be tempting to treat Comey as a saint, and his Bureau as some kind of exalted institution beyond time, space, and politics. Jimmy Kimmel has already printed shirts reading “James Comey is my Homey,” while John McCain has called him “arguably the most respected person in America.” Columnists, politicians, and others have lauded the FBI for its supposed neutrality, independence, and non-political nature. Comey himself, in his farewell letter, described the FBI as a “rock for America” and a “rock of competence, honesty, and independence.”

To be sure, the FBI has done some praiseworthy work. It’s investigated white supremacist infiltration of police departments. It’s arrested right-wing terrorists bent on attacking minorities. And even in its worst days, under J. Edgar Hoover, it took on the KKK and investigated the murders of civil rights activists in the South.