To treat your facts with imagination is one thing, to imagine your facts is another.

Interpretation and invention feel similar from the inside and are not remotely the same. Taking what is true and finding the pattern, the connection, the way of telling it, is honest work. Deciding what would make the story better and then believing it happened is where people quietly lose their footing.

When you are building a case, mark clearly which parts you checked and which you inferred. Do this in your own notes especially. That boundary is easy to hold while you can still see it and nearly impossible to reconstruct afterwards.