Since 2009, each edition of the State Department’s annual Country Reports on Terrorism has contained a cheerful fiction: State has given the nation that it insists on calling the “DPRK”—using the anti-democratic, anti-people, and anti-republican Pyongyang government’s laughable official appellation, the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea—a clean bill of health. North Korea “is not known to have sponsored any terrorist acts since the bombing of a Korean Airlines flight in 1987,” last year’s document reads. The country has therefore remained safely off the United States’ list of state sponsors of terrorism.

This year’s report, due to be released by April 30, will require a revision. For what last year was—at a minimum—a highly questionable judgment now looks utterly indefensible in the wake of North Korea’s brazen assassination of its dictator’s older half-brother at Kuala Lumpur’s airport on February 13.