I have to concur, on several different grounds.
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It’s absolutely inappropriate for a mod to edit a post in order to break a link just because he doesn’t agree with it. If the link doesn’t break any rules, this takes us into the realm of arbitrary and direct alteration of a poster’s content without good reason.
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WhatExit, you state that “[the] picture was suspicious and possibly wrong”. I’ll point out that @JohnT is a respected and informative poster who recently made some very valuable contributions sharing his expertise about Medicare. This is not a poster who should automatically attract suspicion. It’s a poster who should be encouraged to continue being a valuable member of the community. Nor was there any reason to believe the graph was in some way “suspicious” or “wrong”. And as it turns out, of course, it was perfectly legitimate.
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The principle of posting images from Flickr or Imgur or other image hosting sites is now well established here. There’s nothing about that to attract suspicion – we have to do it since direct posting of images is not allowed, and sometimes it’s impractical or impossible to link directly to images on another website.
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Regardless of any of the above, the image could have been confirmed as authentic in literally two seconds just by typing some variant of the title that was in it, like “FRED total money supply”, which is what I did. The referenced image turns up immediately, on the Federal Reserve Bank of St Louis website.
All in all, this was frankly very inappropriate moderation, IMO. I’m now concerned that @JohnT, having been twice burned by questionable moderation, may no longer be willing to put up with it, which would be a terrible loss to the community.