On Halloween night in 2005, Councilman (now Mayor) Luke Ravenstahl got into an argument with a police officer at a Steelers game outside Heinz Field. He ended up being put in handcuffs, but after a short detention nothing ever came of it.

At least nothing came of it in the legal sense, but Mr. Ravenstahl is no Ordinary Joe, and the rumor mill picked up where the incident left off. These days the dubious business of rumor-mongering finds electronic amplification on the Internet. In this brave new world of participatory democracy, every partisan has an opinion, although not necessarily the facts.

Caught in the sights of blogs and anonymous faxes, Mr. Ravenstahl did the right thing this week in addressing his critics head on, not only about the Heinz Field affair but also an incident that supposedly involved him and the police at PNC Park in June -- something the mayor completely denies.

As it is, his description of what happened at the Steelers game must have been a bit of a disappointment to his detractors. As he recounts it, Mr. Ravenstahl's arrest was the result of telling Officer Mark A. Hoehn that he didn't appreciate the way the officer was aggressively treating the fans during a crowd surge.

Suddenly, he is a champion of the people, not an important guy who got off easy. And while the rumor-mongers would have us believe that this was hushed up by Dennis Regan, the former city operations director revealed as a political fixer in the recent federal suit brought by Cmdr. Catherine McNeilly, he wasn't in the city administration back then.

Of course, nobody except the participants really knows what happened that night -- and, so far, Officer Hoehn is not telling. By the mayor's own admission, he had consumed "some alcoholic beverages" (although he says he wasn't drunk) and he used inappropriate language. But this is known to happen at Steelers games.

The officer may have given him a break because of who he was -- that would be very Pittsburgh -- but at the same time the mayor's account is not implausible either. Absent any new facts, city residents may very well think of that expression made famous a few years ago by the elderly lady in the Wendy's commercials: Where's the beef?

This is a tale that seemed more interesting as an open secret than now as a banal, low-grade revelation. When the mayor's race begins in earnest this year, Pittsburghers would be wise to focus on issues of real substance.