Like a lot of his fellow Apple employees, John Gruber of Daring Fireball is incensed about Gizmodo taking possession of a stolen iPhone and turning it into a scoop. But Gruber is going a little bit around the bend. He’s been emailing me nonstop, telling me I should have everyone arrested. And here is his latest post, where he makes the case against Gizmodo and the guy who found the phone in the bar, claiming they have all broken the law, that under the California penal code (hoo boy) what they did constitutes theft, and then he loads up some innuendo about how the whole story of “finding” the phone doesn’t make any sense and what if these guys actually followed some Apple engineer and picked his pocket or something, and even if they didn’t do that, they should all be sent to the chair put in prison for life.

Gah. And now Daniel Eran Dilger is weighing in, with a finely crafted 16,000-word essay on the whole thing which basically concludes that, (a) yes, this all happened, and (b) Windows people are stupid assholes who are always conspiring against Apple because we are the one true holy church of technology, and it drives them crazy that we’re so good and they’re so evil. And Andy Ihnatko, another Friend of Apple, says Gizmodo are scum.

I can’t deal with Dilger and Ihnatko — even over email they give me hives. But Gruber I can handle. I keep telling him, John, dude, I love you like a son, but you’re letting this get to you, it’s getting under your skin, you need to let it go, and anyway it’s not up to us to file criminal charges. We can’t do that. So go bug the cops or something. He says he’s done that, but the cops in Redwood City won’t do anything, and now he’s thinking about just making the arrest himself, and if that doesn’t work then he’s going to go to law school and become a lawyer and bring a civil lawsuit against Gawker Media and the finder guy.

Good luck with that.

(Photo by Art Director Jason. Much love.)