I try to understand the extent and reason for their neurotic fixation, and come to the conclusion that they need help

I am no psychiatrist, but I understand instinctively that somewhere along the line their obsession belongs to the same psychiatric family as the one that makes men mutilate and kill women.

I just know – again, purely instinctively – that if I were a man they wouldn’t be so angry, so viciously obsessed and so unable to let go.

Look at them: they’re still at it. They are really, truly sick.

In sum, Jeffrey Pullicino Orlando wanted my admiration and when he didn’t get it, he became obsessed with vengeance. The obsession developed very clear pathological traits and years later shows no sign of diminishing but rather the opposite. If I were Lara Boffa I would be seriously concerned at the extent of his obsession – just as he would be if she were to spend her days fixating about retaliation and vengeance on some man – but instead the fool joins in like his sidekick.

Get out of there, Miss Boffa, before you find out why the other two ran away in fear, leaving most of their belongings behind; before he starts running around with a gun and threatening to kill you or kill himself.

That I would write about a political figure who is the chairman of a state council and very prominent in the news and in political meddling is normal and obvious. It is my job.

That the same person should fixate on a journalist in this manner is completely abnormal. It is sick. We are not equal figures in this situation. I am a journalist and he is a state council chairman and political figure. People in his position should understand that they are exposed to scrutiny and even mockery and if they can’t stand the heat they should get out of that kitchen instead of attacking journalists and members of the public, on Facebook, who criticise them even politely.

It is also utterly inappropriate for the executive chairman of a state council to reduce himself so publicly to the exercise of his fixation on a (woman) journalist who thinks him sick, ridiculous, dangerously unfit for purpose, a vicious political meddler, very much in need of psychiatric treatment and a disgrace to his position on the public payroll.

Jeffrey Pullicino Orlando is unwell. Somebody needs to take that particular bull by the horns. The matter of who can force him to get treatment is for his family, such as it is, and is none of our business. But the matter of whether somebody so very unwell should be left in charge, as executive chairman with no internal controls (because he has appointed his own people to key positions) of a significant state council is up to the prime minister.

The prime minister is responsible for this mess.