He never kidnapped anyone, or raped anyone, or murdered anyone. He was never violent to the women who will take the stand. He’s never tasted human flesh. But he thought about these things, and he talked about these things. He may have even taken steps to plan them out. But did he really mean to do them? “This case is about seeing the difference between the real world and the pretend world on the Internet,” said his lawyer Julia Gatto, a public defender who represented the Times Square bomber Faisal Shahzad, in her opening statement Monday. (Shahzad ended up pleading guilty and getting a life sentence.) “This is a really, really important case. Not for Gilberto Valle, for all of us.”

The lead prosecutor for the government is Randall Jackson, who with his hulking frame and shaved head looks a bit like Tiki Barber. Jackson wants to emphasize that while Valle’s online chats may have started off as fantasy—”depraved, but not true,” is how he put it—they quickly turned into “detailed, strategic discussions about real women.” That is to say, at some point in 2012, Valle crossed the line between masturbatory banter and criminal intent. What he thought and what he typed online bled over into what he planned to do.

It is unthinkable that someone as disturbed as Gilberto Valle might be out on the streets again. How would you feel if you were one of the women he discussed in e-mails stalking, murdering, and eating? And yet, is it a crime to have these pitch-black thoughts, and to write them down? We typically use the Orwellian concept of “thoughtcrime” to criticize the excesses of political correctness, but it seems to me that Valle is on trial for thoughtcrime. And I hope he is put away for a long, long time! But if he is, aren’t there some interesting philosophical implications here?

On the other hand, maybe it’s not that interesting after all. If Valle were on trial because investigators found evidence that he was plotting with others to blow up the Empire State Building, a claim that he was just role-playing as a terrorist in an online fantasy game would be laughed out of court.

The only funny part of any of this — but also one of the most disturbing — is this passage from Engber’s report, in which the author discusses evidence at trial of an online correspondence between Valle and Martin Van Hise, with whom he discussed kidnapping and delivering a woman as a sex slave:

But this oversight is only inexplicable if you think their plot was real, as opposed to a fantasy role-play that could be varied and repeated from one month to the next. As I pointed out in a preview of the trial a few weeks ago, Van Hise’s own wife knows about his sadistic role-plays and says that she is not particularly afraid of them. In January, she told the New York Daily News, “It’s disturbing, yeah. But you have to accept your partner’s flaws in a marriage.” He’s a “big teddy bear,” she said, and “as hard-core as a baby.”

Good grief. “You have to accept your partner’s flaws” when they include detailed fantasies about kidnapping actual women and turning them into sex slaves? Yeah, I guess you do have to accept those flaws, if you are a complete idiot.