Did the Journal of the Political Economy make a serious mistake in accepting a paper?

John Palmer has an extremely lengthy excerpt from an investigative report on a paper on file sharing that was published by the JPE (for a previous post see here). This discussion involves a case where the editor was apparently told about severe data errors in the piece before publication, told that the authors were unwilling to share their data before publication and have still refused to do so (coming out with multiple conflicting reasons for not doing this), and questions about whether the rejection of a comment pointing out the data errors was done properly. When told that there was improper behavior with the data the editor's response was interpreted by Stan Liebowitz to mean this: "There appears to be no way within the profession to adjudicate such claims. In fact, the profession tends to operate as if all economists are truthful all the time."

Craig Newmark has his comments here. Peter Klein has comments here, who classifies this under the general category of "Academic Journal Fakery." Other posts here (Paul Walker) and here ("provocateurjim") also draw concerns over what happened in this case.