There were two ironies to the revelation that Vice President Pence had a private AOL email account that he used as recently as last year while serving as governor of Indiana. The first, and most obvious, is that the campaign that elevated Pence to his current position spent an awful lot of time criticizing Hillary Clinton for her use of a private email system while she was at the State Department. The second is that Pence’s situation was apparently actually worse: While hackers tried to access Clinton’s server, they were unsuccessful. Pence’s account, the Indianapolis Star reported, “was hacked.”

Apparently. While the two scenarios are dissimilar in a lot of important ways, there’s one way in which they might be the same: It’s not entirely clear that Pence’s email was actually hacked.

If Pence’s account was hacked, that’s a serious problem. While he wasn’t trading in international diplomacy (as Clinton was), he was still conducting official business from the account. (The Star published some of the official correspondence it received from a public records request.) A hack of any email is a problem. A hack of a government official’s is worse.