By seven, I was awake for good, this time with a mug of milky coffee and my open laptop. I zipped through my e-mail fast but stopped deleting junk when I saw two Google alerts for SFPD.

The alerts were linked to the San Francisco Post, and the front-page story was headlined “Revenge vs. the SFPD.”

My stomach clenched when I saw the byline.

Writer Jason Blayney was the Post ’s crime desk pit bull, well known for his snarky rhetoric and his hate-on for cops. The Post didn’t mind if Blayney stretched the facts into a lie — and often, he did.

I started reading Blayney’s account of Chaz Smith’s murder. Chaz Smith, a known top-tier drug dealer, was assassinated Sunday afternoon in the men’s room at the Morton Academy of Music during their annual spring recital. The academy, located on California Street, was packed with parents and students during the shooting. Smith has been under investigation by the SFPD for the past three years but because of the closing of the city’s corrupt drug lab, he has never gone on trial. According to a source who spoke to the Post on condition of anonymity, Chaz Smith’s assassin “demonstrated professional skills in the killing of this drug dealer. It was a very slick hit.” Smith is the fourth high-level drug dealer who has been executed in this manner. In the opinion of this reporter, a professional do-good hit man is cleaning up the mess that the SFPD can’t rub out. That’s why I call this killer Revenge — and given the size of the mess that needs to be cleaned, he could just be getting started…

He’d said it himself: “In the opinion of this reporter.” It was a phrase that meant “I’m not actually reporting. I’m telling a story.”

And his “story” was a slam against the SFPD.

The Delete button was right under my index finger, but instead of sending the article to the recycle bin, I opened the link to the second story, headlined “Death at the Ellsworth Compound?”