From a broad moral perspective, last Friday's assassination - and that is what it was - of Douglas Chambers, ought to rate no higher, if no less, than the nearly 2,000 less well-known people, who are killed each year.

Yet, there is something different, and more chillingly sinister, about Mr Chambers' death than the wanton killings, including law enforcement officers, that take place each year. Chambers' murder shatters myth and farce. It also reduces the places for us to hide from ourselves. It lays bare and stark some hard realities. For, to be blunt about it, his killing represents a direct and open challenge to the Jamaican State. It is a test of its capacity to respond.

This murder, in that regard, is part of a wider pattern. It has, for instance, to be read in tandem with last week's affair in August Town, which, but for the potency of its danger, might have been farcically comical - an open truce/peace treaty between community warlords, who get to keep their weapons because they do not trust the state's law enforcement agency to ensure security. Recall, this pact was negotiated, or at least facilitated by persons with quasi-state authority.

We warned of August Town, that it represents a concession by the state to the authority of the hard men of violence, an accretion of power and the legitimisation of their status, that can only lead to the diminution of a national, central authority. They keep their guns now. Next is the demand for the keeping of law enforcement agencies away, to be followed by assertions of a devolved political authority led by criminals.

It is those same questions that are posed of the state by those who ordered and executed the hit on Chambers. They can, they believe, act with impunity, because they can get away with it, the very basis of anarchy. Therein lies the significance of this murder, and what places it apart from other recent killings, even of coordinated attacks on members of the security forces.

Chambers represented the authority of the state at a high and substantive level. But perhaps more important, he represented something more significant, a change from the permissive indulgence in which the alternative forces thrived. By daring to attempt to clean the Jamaican Urban Transit Company (JUTC) of waste and corruption, Chambers raised a challenge to an element of their power and source of existence. People such as Mr Chambers, therefore, cannot be allowed to succeed.

The important question, now, is how will the Jamaican State respond? One thing ought to be clear to those who formally hold power and are, broadly, part of the state apparatus: this tenuous coexistence between the Jamaican State and the emerging balkanised communities, with their warlord bosses, cannot be allowed to stand.

It is important that Prime Minister Golding understands the nature and the depth of the crisis and acts accordingly - and in accordance with the sounds he made post-Vale Royal. Mrs Simpson Miller, unfortunately, appears not fully seized of the dangers we face. She has adopted a populist waffle.

But should we fail, neither she nor Mr Golding might have a state over which to squabble.