It’s possible that Mace is genuinely disgusted by Boebert’s anti-Muslim comments. Perhaps her gut reaction was to address them head-on. Sometimes politicians do the right thing simply because it is the right thing to do. That same impulse could be what drove Mace to criticize Trump after January 6, before she seemed to change her mind.

More cynically, Mace might see some sort of political benefit here. Her district, which runs from Charleston to Hilton Head, isn’t quite as conservative as the rest of South Carolina. Her voters are a bit more socially moderate and environmentally conscious, and Mace ran on a platform that didn’t line up neatly with that of her Republican peers. She might have figured that the voters in her district would be turned off by Boebert’s Islamophobia, and that they would give her credit for calling it out. Inserting herself in Twitter spats is probably good for fundraising too: Mace’s condemnation of Boebert has already been retweeted by at least one Democratic legislator, who held up her tweet as an example of a GOP lawmaker “caught being good” and recommended that people read Mace’s book. In the coming weeks, Mace might see an ensuing increase in donations. She’s already expecting at least one primary challenge next year, so she needs all the financial help she can get.

Feel free to believe either of those theories. But something else could also be at work here. Mace is charismatic, smart, and ambitious, and it must be disheartening for her to be constantly overshadowed by colleagues who traffic in racism and conspiracy theories about Jewish space lasers.