I'm not giving free passes though. I'm saying that, in a vacuum, that single behaviour from GEP was townish. With emphasis on the "ish".
I suppose it's counter intuitive but in my experience it's a very common trait for villagers to get angry when people start erroneously calling them scum with tenuous reasoning. Conversely, wolves know they're guilty so they don't have the same genuine frustration of being misread.
These are big generalizations, obviously.