The exclusion of Governor Sarah Palin from Senator McCain’s funeral this afternoon strikes us as an off-note from the McCain camp. It’s unclear exactly who — the Senator before he died or his family or others — decided not to extend an invitation. Reports, in People magazine and Breitbart News, suggest that not only was Mrs. Palin not invited but that she was asked to stay away. It’s a missed opportunity in respect of a man who sought to summon our better angels.

It’s not as if Mrs. Palin had pushed her way into McCain’s political life. His presidential campaign was floundering when, in the summer of 2008, he sought to make a Hail Mary play by reaching out to ask Mrs. Palin to join his ticket. At the time, the Alert Alaskan, as we have called her, had the highest approval rating of any governor in the country. Much is made of the risk Mr. McCain took in bringing on a freshman governor. Also, too, though, Mrs. Palin took a risk.

At the time, we called her a “brilliant pick.” She had few peers in the business of challenging the old-boy network in the GOP, and her grasp of energy policy — “Drill, baby, drill” — was ahead of the curve. One of the first things she said when McCain introduced her to a rapturous crowd at Dayton was that her husband, Todd, was a member of the Steelworkers Union. She, too, had carried a union card, a rare boast for a Republican.

We had hoped that Mrs. Palin’s accession to the McCain ticket would lead to a big tent approach to the GOP campaign. She tried in vain to get McCain to campaign in Michigan, a demarche immortalized in the movie “Game Change.” Even after President Obama’s victory, Mrs. Palin helped keep the Republican issues before the voters. She, alone in the GOP, reached out to Big Labor, which we wrote about in “Palin’s Fraternal Greetings” and “Woman of the Year.”

Mrs. Palin also was ahead of the curve on monetary policy. After the campaign, on the eve of President Obama’s visit to the G20 in Seoul, she lashed out at Chairman Bernanke’s policy known as quantitative easing. The president, of course, spurned her advice. Mr. Obama thus returned home to a page one headline in the New York Times that said, “Obama’s Economic View Is Rejected on World Stage.” It turned out that Mrs. Palin was way ahead not only of the Democrats but of her former running mate.

We understand that this will be set down as an eccentric, even revisionist view, but it’s ours. One thing to mark, in any event, is that in the years that followed the McCain-Palin defeat, Senator McCain refused to blame her and she never said, so far as we’re aware, anything about him other than that he was a great American hero. It wasn’t until this spring that McCain suggested he wished he’d picked as a running mate the centrist Democrat Joe Lieberman.

“That’s not what Senator McCain has told me all these years,” Mrs. Palin responded. It was a sign, in our opinion, that life had begun to ebb from what we called the “scrappy sandcutter.” A hero with few parallels in our history, McCain was entitled to his errors. The next person to make a point of not skipping Michigan, and the rest of the “Blue Wall,” ended up in 2016 as America’s surprise choice to be president. We’re sorry he wasn’t invited to the funeral as well.