> this article is really a character study about the author, and not at all about cheating

Yeah exactly. Extreme cop energy in the writing those scripts and publicly documenting so much of the chat text verbatim. I started out sympathetic to the author, and still am abstractly, that's a hard spot for a teacher to be in.

But it started to feel like the author expected me to find it... titillating? attractively transgressive? Just a gross secondhand voyeurism type thing I didn't like it at all.

Talk to the students or fail them all and move on. I don't think the impulse to invest so much time and technique in this "investigation" should be encouraged.