Dan,
I just brought the same issue up on wikipedia-l. As I (User:Eloquence) noted on the Talk page to [[Richard Wagner]], I agree that Ed's use of sysop powers in this matter is unacceptable, and I remember a similar incident where Ed was accused of wrongly protecting a page. He seems to be the only sysop who regularly does so.
I still think Ed is, in general, trustworthy. He has, so far, done a good job of clueing in newbies and reverting obvious vandalism. In spite of some of his rather extreme viewpoints, he usually manages to stay on the right side of NPOV. If he can agree to a more narrow definition of sysop responsibilities than the one he currently seems to follow, I have no problem with him holding these privileges.
Regards,
Erik (non-sysop and proud of it ;-)