The media’s latest brouhaha about Susan Rice misses the point.

The focus should not be on who will be the next secretary of state; the president hasn’t nominated anyone yet. Instead, the focus should be squarely on what happened on Sept. 11, 2012, in Benghazi, Libya, and how we can better protect Americans serving overseas and help ensure a tragedy such as that doesn’t happen again.

As a leader of the Senate Homeland Security Committee, Sen. Susan Collins is conducting a bipartisan investigation into the attacks that killed four Americans, including our ambassador. Collins is not blaming Rice for what happened in Benghazi or what happened at our embassies in Africa in 1998.

What she is doing is trying to figure out if we have learned any lessons from the 1998 attacks. What went wrong? How do we fix it?

Rice appeared on five different Sunday morning talk shows, five days after the attack, and read the president’s talking points. Rice now admits that they knew shortly after the attack that this was an act of terrorism, but she never mentioned it as a possibility that Sunday morning. Instead, she chose to wrongly blame it on a spontaneous outbreak of violence spurred by an anti-Islam video.

This is the problem when governing is confused with politics. Collins is not playing politics, she’s leading an investigation to find out what happened.

I commend Collins for remaining focused on finding the truth.

Cynthia Izon, Norridgewock