This past week was quite the drama-filled battle of church vs. state fought out in, of all places, Louisville/

Here you had a mayor saying one thing, a governor saying another, the nation’s oldest Southern Baptist seminary weighing in and members of Congress jumping in with angry tweets and phone calls. And a federal judge jumped into the drama, as well.

The Louisville Courier-Journal did yeoman work — with one or two small holes — in covering this battle that began with an announcement on Good Friday that cops were going to be taking down license plates in church parking lots and plunking quarantine notices on car windshields.

But there was a ton of confusion as to who was in charge.

Louisville Metro Police officers will be writing down the license plate numbers of those who attend church services over Easter weekend, Mayor Greg Fischer said Friday.

Fischer has asked Louisvillians to forgo in-person gatherings, including drive-in services, to lessen the spread of the coronavirus. He said the license information would be given to the city's health department.

"If we allowed this in Louisville, we'd have hundreds of thousands of people driving around the city Sunday, and boy, the virus would just love that," Fischer said.

Really? Is that what Louisville is like on a typical Easter? (Also, note the phrase “including drive-in services.”)

This is where the reporter should have pointed out there’s never “hundreds of thousands” of locals driving about the city on a Sunday morning.

Dr. Sarah Moyer, the city's public health director, said knowing who was at gatherings, such as in-person church services, can help the department notify those who might have been exposed if an attendee later falls ill.

"If we have a case, we have a list of names of who needs to quarantine and isolate," she said. "And it'll just make our investigation go quicker, as well."

Kentucky’s governor issued a similar order Friday, saying in-person attendance at religious services was forbidden — but not drive-ins.

So you’ve got two standards being pushed here by public officials who didn’t check with each other first. That confusion lingered over the online firestorm that grew out of this conflict.