Law-breaking, wasting public funds and an elected official who’s increasingly unpopular — the story had everything you would want in an exposé. So when WTOP’s Mark Segraves reported Monday that D.C. Mayor Adrian Fenty used a police escort and clogged up area roads on his daily bike ride, everyone jumped on it. Including us.

But in the ensuing rancor, local cyclists were left seething at what they perceived as a hit-job not on Fenty, but on them. A regional cycling email list jumped to life as a number of cyclists criticized the WTOP report for being needlessly biased against them and for not proving that Fenty and his group actually caused any traffic tie-ups, as Segraves claimed. And while many agreed that it looked bad for Fenty to ride with a police escort and have his bikes transported to and from races in an official vehicle, many felt that the report didn’t live up to its billing.

In direct conversations and in a discussion on the email list of the Mid-Atlantic Bicycle Racing Association, a number of area cyclists pointed out that while Fenty should not have been riding on the Clara Barton Parkway as he’s seen doing, little else displayed in the WTOP video was notably dangerous or illegal.

In one segment of the video, Segraves shows a car honking its horn at Fenty’s group as they rode two-abreast on MacArthur Boulevard in Maryland — which is legal. (The annoyed driver, on the other hand, illegally passed them on a double yellow line.) In two other segments, Segraves claims that Fenty is blowing through red lights, but, as cyclist Brian Hennessey points out, “Fenty doesn’t actually go through a single red light. His police escort does.”