I suppose this is normal behavior of present Popes for past Popes? And here I thought excommunication was a bad thing.
It's not normal and excommunication of popes or patriarchs is never a good thing.
Pope Honorius I was found guilty of heresy. Surviving copies of his correspondence with archbishop Sergius of Constantinople indicate that he did not subscribe to monothelism, but the Sixth Ecumenical Council that condemned him cited letters as evidence that he did subscribe to this heresy. Unfortunately, the Council also decided to destroy the evidence by burning those letters!
Nonetheless, his private correspondence shows that while he was willing to be "silent" on monthelism and allowed it to co-exist in the Church, he personally did not fail in orthodox Christology. He also never officially embraced monothelism as Archibishop Sergius did.
But there is no question as to the guilt of Honorius and his just excommunication unless the Sixth Ecumenical Council can be called "staged," which I doubt since the (Roman) Catholic Church acknowledges it as a valid Ecumenical Council.
Because the EC proclaimations speak for the entire Church and are binding resolutions, the popes (from the 7th through the 11th century) condemned Pope Honorius I in their oath of installation (as stated in Liber Diurnus), which "smites with eternal anathema the originators of the new heresy," Sergius, together with others including Honorius, "because he assisted the base assertion of the heretics" which is just short of calling him a heretic.
That practice stopped after the Great Schism, when Rome and Constantinople broke intercommunion, and Latin Catholic apologetics "exhonorated" Pope Honorius I at least by silence and some hyperbolic theoretical suppositions in writing -- but the RCC never officially disasallowed the Sixth Ecumenical Council's decisions.