He had pleaded guilty to harassing some unfortunate internet acquaintance, a woman he had gone to school with as a child and who he had initiated contact with through FB. He was clearly always nuts, and she made the mistake of trying to help him, and he virtually destroyed her life.
After he appealed the conviction (and lost, of course), the story became well known in town, And one of the newspaper columnists wrote an article about the dangers of these internet “relationships,” warning people not to be careless about who they permit to contact them.
So he’s the classic paranoid nutcase nursing an imaginary grievance (from elementary school, apparently) and there was nothing political about the attack or even the fact that the attacked a newspaper. It was “revenge” for their warnings about his earlier Internet harassment of the woman.
That sounds accurate to me.