Congratulations are in order for the publisher of the New York Times, A.G. Sulzberger, who has finally landed an op-ed piece in the Wall Street Journal. He’s moving on up. And with an important piece about how irresponsible it is for President Trump to issue a tweet accusing the Times of committing, in the course of exposing our cyber attacks on Russia’s electrical grid, “a virtual act of treason.”

Our own view is that, given the temper of the times (and, for that matter, the Times), Mr. Sulzberger has missed part of the story. The President seems to have chosen his words carefully. When he tweets about “virtual” treason, he seems to be using the word “virtual” in the sense that it is defined in Webster’s classic Second International Unabridged — “being in essence or effect, but not in fact.”

After all, if Mr. Trump reckoned the Times had committed “actual” treason, he would have already sicced the FBI on the Gray Lady. Instead, all the President did was hyperventilate on Twitter — which is no worse than what, say, the Times’ own headline writers did when they put over a Charles Blow column the headline “Trump, Treasonous Traitor.”

No responsible newspaper, you might exclaim, would put that kind of headline over a column about a president of America, even if, in the columnist’s estimation, the president did fail to respond adequately to Russia’s interference in our election. Well, not only did the Times print that headline but the columnist neglected to qualify the treason as “virtual.”

“Trump,” Mr. Blow concluded, “is more concerned with protecting his presidency and validating his election than he is in protecting this country. This is an incredible, unprecedented moment. America is being betrayed by its own president. America is under attack and its president absolutely refuses to defend it. Simply put, Trump is a traitor and may well be treasonous.”

Nor has Mr. Blow been the only Times scribe flinging around loose talk about treason. One of the paper’s most intrepid columnists, Nick Kristof, issued a while back a column headlined “‘There’s a Smell of Treason in the Air.’” The headline echoed a quote from the historian Douglas Brinkley. Mr. Kristof stopped short of actually accusing Mr. Trump of treason — but he wasn’t so kind to Richard Nixon.

Even the Times’ Nobel laureate in economics, Paul Krugman, has hinted darkly about treason. “After all the flag-waving, all the attacks on Democrats’ patriotism,” he wrote two years ago, “essentially the whole GOP turns out to be OK with the moral equivalent of treason if it benefits their side in domestic politics.” It ran under the headline “The New Climate of Treason.”

We don’t mind saying that we share Mr. Sulzberger’s concern, and the Journal’s, over loose talk about treason. “The New York Sun Reporter’s Handbook and Manual of Style” warns: “Care is at a premium when using the word treason, which in the Sun as in the Constitution may consist only in levying war against the United States or adhering to their enemies, giving them aid and comfort.”

Feature the liberality of that formulation — and of the hurdles our Constitution sets for a conviction of treason. Two witnesses are needed. They must witness an act. It must be the same act. The act must be “overt.” A confession to treason must be made in court. It must be open court. One can, it seems, even adhere to an enemy, so long as one doesn’t give aid and comfort.

That last point set America apart from the era when even “imagining” the death of the King was a capital crime. Even so, one could argue that Mr. Trump has a greater responsibility than the press to take care in using the word treason. He, after all, is the president and, like all officers, judges, and legislators of our federal and state governments, is sworn to the Constitution, including its definition of treason.

The press, though, is also a historical actor. It is a custodian of the language. It feeds politics as much as it dines on them. As the 2016 election neared, the Times issued a front-page piece suggesting that maybe Mr. Trump warranted an end to objectivity. Within months its columns were bubbling with the talk of treason. Who’s to say the president didn’t pick up that kind of language from the Times itself?