Republic Dilemma

I was working my night shift yesterday at the Arizona Republic and I was sent to cover a police briefing about the defense attorney David De Costa, who smuggled drugs to one of his clients, a prisoner, during a court preceding. 

After I wrote the story and it was posted on azcentral.com, I started browsing other media outlets' coverage of the story. 

FOX10 and 3TV were reporting that De Costa had allegedly committed the crime in return for sexual favors from the prisoner's girlfriend, 19-year-old Emilee Keen, among other information that we did not know. 3TV posted the Form IV, which is a court document with the recommended charges from police against the accused. 

The form also contains a narrative of how the story and crime came to light. 

At this point, it was 8 p.m., and we were not going to be able to get our own copy of the Form IV from Maricopa County Sheriff's Office until the next morning. 

Although my night editor and I decided against using the information from the Form IV on the azfamily.com Web site, my real question is would it have been ethically right or wrong to use it knowing that we would be able to get the same document the next morning to corroborate our story? Is it possible that we may have been misled by the documents in the case that 3TV had altered them in any way? Or was it best to wait until for our own copies of the documents to arrive in the morning and write the story later, since we were already late?

The story was eventually rewritten later the next day. This is the follow-up. You will notice that we added the needed information that other outlets were reporting the night before, and we corrected the misspelled name of Ms. Keen.