‘The heaven-born mission of journalism is to disseminate truth; to eradicate error; to educate, refine, and elevate the tone of public morals and manners, and make all men more gentle, more virtuous, more charitable, and in all ways better, and holier, and happier; and yet this blackhearted scoundrel degrades his great office persistently to the dissemination of falsehood, calumny, vituperation, and vulgarity.’

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That paragraph is from one of Mark Twain’s most celebrated stories, “Journalism in Tennessee.” It’s about the genre of one newspaper writing about another. It’s the first thing we turned to in respect of the feud between Jeff Bezos of the Washington Post and David Pecker of the National Enquirer. It offers some perspective on what could turn into a journalistic feud for the ages.

Let us all make the most of it, we say. It’s not every day that the richest man in the world is in the news for winging various messages over the internet to a woman other than his wife. Or that such messages and also some photos end up in the hands of the very publication that, in the National Enquirer, the First Amendment permits to deal with these sorts of situations.

What’s the richest man in the world to do? It turns out that Mr. Bezos, by his own account, rang up the globe’s greatest gumshoe, Gavin de Becker, and asked him to get to the bottom — our phrase — of the scandal. Mr. Bezos told Mr. de Becker, as Mr. Bezos himself put it, “to proceed with whatever budget he needed to pursue the facts in this matter.” Gaaaw, just think about it.

Mr. Bezos, though, isn’t the world’s richest person for nothing. He could have hired Robert Mueller. That’s to whom America’s taxpayers gave one of those unlimited budgets. Coming up on two years later, Mr. Mueller is still running through the taxpayers’ moolah, having yet to lay a finger on anyone important. No doubt Mr. de Becker could have done it for less.

Mr. de Becker’s lawyer certainly received some eye-popping emails from the National Enquirer. One suggests that the Washington Post is “poised to publish unsubstantiated rumors of The National Enquirer’s initial report” and goes on to describe to Mr. de Becker’s lawyer “photos obtained during our newsgathering.” Another wire proposes terms of a settlement.

The Washington Post’s owner published the correspondence on a blog, saying he’d prefer to stand up and “roll this log over, and see what crawls out.” That was well put, we thought, if self-congratulatory. The Enquirer gave no quarter. Its parent, AMI, turned around and disclosed that at the time of Mr. Bezos’ allegations, AMI “was in good faith negotiations to resolve all matters with him.”

Now President Trump’s Justice Department is looking into whether, as the Associated Press put it, “the Enquirer’s feud” with Mr. Bezos “violated a cooperation and non-prosecution agreement that recently spared the tabloid from charges” in a case involving “hush money to a Playboy model who claimed to have had an affair with Donald Trump.” If so, the non-prosecution agreement could be in doubt.

It’s not our intention here to opine in respect of which newspaper — the Post or the Enquirer — is right here (we’re avid readers of both of them). It’s merely to point out that such histrionics among newspapers are as American as pie made from apples, even if a fracas of this octane doesn’t come along with every load of newsprint. In Mark Twain’s story about Tennessee, the feud erupted in gunfire, which solved nothing, whatever it might have done for circulation.

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This editorial was revised from an earlier edition to substitute at the top a better quotation from Mark Twain’s “Journalism in Tennessee” than the quotation in the bulldog edition.