Over the past few days, everything you probably ever wanted to know about Twitter has been available on TechCrunch, which has published a flurry of internal confidential documents provided by French hacker Hacker Croll, who broke into Twitter’s internal systems.

While TechCrunch has attracted a lot of attention for putting on display Twitter’s internal thoughts, discussions, plans and strategic vision, it has also garnered growing criticism for publishing the documents, which were stolen from Twitter.

Personally, I think TechCrunch did what any news organization would do if given something that would make for a terrific story. The documents sent by Hacker Croll to TechCrunch were the equivalent of the unmarked brown envelope sent to newspaper reporters that often provide great material for front paper stories.

This kind of material is a dream come true for news organizations, so TechCrunch’s decision to go to town with several posts was a no-brainer. Twitter is the world’s hottest high-tech company, attracting huge amounts of scrutiny and dissection.

In a competitive world, TechCrunch had an editorial decision to make:

- publish, and face of wrath of people who believe that stolen documents shouldn’t see the light of day; or

- not publish, and risk that one of its major competitors (GigaOm, Mashable, ReadWriteWeb) would be all this story if they had been given the documents.

The news business is not always fair and some stories can be embarassing but that’s the nature of the beast. TechCrunch did what it had to do.

More: If Twitter decides to sue TechCrunch, I think it would be a mistake by pouring fuel on the fire

Addendum: Here’s TechCrunch’s Michael Arrington on how a hacker was able to hack into Twitter’s computer systems.