The news that charges were filed last Friday in the Gavin Knupp fatal hit-and-run case, might have some people expecting some form of commentary on what has just happened and what should happen next.

The next steps in this process, however, are the responsibility of the local justice system, which doesn’t need any advice from this quarter on how to do its job.

As it is, the filing of charges in this high-profile case marks the conclusion of just the first of many steps that remain before the final reckoning in this tragedy arrives.

Although members of the community profess to know all about what happened, it remains that the no one except the people directly involved will know anything for a fact until the courts establish precisely what the facts are.

The state’s attorney’s office, obviously, can’t expand on its comments because legal protocols limit the prosecution’s ability to say anything more than to confirm the existence of the charging documents and to clarifying a point or two within that publicly available information.

Beyond that, anything prosecutors might have to say must be said in court in order to prevent generating pre-trial publicity that won’t do it or anyone else any good if this case goes to trial.

The point is, as eager as many people are to see justice served and the Knupp family provided with some degree of closure, if that’s even possible in a situation as heartbreaking as this, we should not get ahead of ourselves and presume, publicly at least, how this will end.

As disagreeable as it might seem, we have no choice but to leave this in the hands of the courts and continue to wait, when, as the late author Michele Hanson wrote, “waiting is bad enough, but not knowing how long is worse.”