[zdean]

Killing someone is a bad outcome no matter how you look at it. But we make a moral distinction between defensive and offensive killing and allow for "justifiable homicide". Similarly, I think the same test would hold true for lying. If you're doing it offensively, it's bad and wrong. If you're doing it defensively (as is the case in this story), I don't think anyone would question that it was morally justifiable.