These things get tricky. Jack has a big mouth, and knows it, and is very much at home stirring the pot. He’s also a sweetheart - really! He’s heard far, far worse than what was thrown at him in that topic. You’ll note that he didn’t reply in kind. He’s “flameproof”. If I were a mod at that time, “no harm, no foul” would have been my take. I would have asked Jack offline, but I’m sure he would have sincerely said he laughed it all off.
I wouldn’t expect anyone to get tagged for defaming me either, and indeed would oppose it. In my early Usenet days I was flamed by true masters of the art, and became flameproof the hard way 
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The worst Python-world thread in my memory was on the python-dev mailing list. I couldn’t find it just now, but just as well. Nobody wants to relive it. “Both sides” were vicious.
For which I bear some responsibility, alas. I was the only active python-dev admin for a large number of years, and has been mentioned before Mailman has very crude moderation abilities. I flat-out refused to bar anyone from posting, regardless of which side they were on, because neither side was (to my eyes) behaving one whit better than the other, and both sides were expressing sincerely held opinions.
The powers that be did pick a side, though, and eventually banned one participant. I’ll never understand that one (“it’s secret”), but heard indirectly from mutual friends how devastated the target was. Serious, extended psychological distress. The protracted cheering from the “winning” side was, to my ears, obscene. Schadenfreude should also violate the CoC.
Anyway, I offered to resign my python-dev stewardship if someone more inclined to take a heavy hand volunteered to step up. Which they did, to my relief.
Those posts were so over the top I don’t think mod editing would have done any good (& I wouldn’t have done it anyway). But I’ve seen here how “just” an 8-hour “slow mode” effectively kills discussion cold, and I would have been happy to try different speed-bump values. At least enough to slow things down enough so that I’d have time enough to hold posts and review them, and take a stab at requesting edits before approving.
Don’t know whether anything of that sort would have helped - but it could not possibly have made things worse 
. I do think, though, that even a 1-hour speed bump would have helped some. At times, these incensed people were screaming at each other as fast as they could type.
"Life is full of questions. Idiots are full of answers.” - Socrates .