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I think you're setting up a false dichotomy, where either a) Clancy was completely off her rocker, and murdered her children in a psychotic fugue state; or b) Clancy coldly, consciously decided to murder her children, expecting to get away with it.
But I think there's a much more plausible third explanation: Lindsay decided to kill herself, but couldn't stomach the idea of a stepmother raising her children in her absence. So she decided "if I can't have you, no one can", and offed them before trying to take her own life. This kind of behaviour is so common there's a Wikipedia page about it*: we just do a double-take with Lindsay because, like all kinds of violent crime, it's far more common for the perpetrator to be a man than a woman. Lindsay probably reasoned that the chances of her successfully killing Patrick were pretty slim, so she went for the next-best option.
*Even a cursory inspection reminds me of how ideologically captured Wikipedia is:
NOT. OUR. CRIMES.
It's not so much that I view these as a hard binary, as that only b] seems like it could possibly have anything to do with an endemic societal issue of devaluing babies' lives because of abortion; so if we rule b] out, that whole aspect of the discourse is left looking like something of a red herring. I didn't mean to imply that if b] was ruled out then Clancy was definitely just an innocent victim of circumstances with no control over her actions whatsoever.
Indeed, I myself further disambiguated the "off her rocker" prong between the momentary psychotic fugue, and the more premeditated option of a convoluted suicide. (I do think that wanting to kill yourself, especially with an accompanying compulsion to kill your own children for the kind of neurotic reasons you describe, constitutes a form of insanity. This isn't to say that it should meet the bar of "legal insanity" qua grounds for acquittal, but legal insanity is a very narrow subset of what we otherwise mean by insanity in conversation, and deliberate self-destruction complete with the annihilation of what one holds most dear out of runaway jealously seems as textbook an example of "crazy" as anything else.)
I agree that anyone who sets out to kill their children and then themselves is "crazy" in the colloquial sense. No one, not even the prosecution, disputes that Lindsay suffered from mental illness. But the evidentiary standard required to establish that a person was insane at the time they committed a crime is much stricter than that required to establish that they suffered from a mental illness. Everyone who was insane at the time they committed a crime has a mental illness, but not everyone who has a mental illness is insane.
I don't think it'd be helpful to restrict common usage of "insane" to the legal category. I don't think calling someone like Clancy insane is simply colloquial/hyperbolic, they simply seem like distinct meanings of the word, with the narrow legal definition being a technical term-of-art, much as "incompetent" and "legally incompetent" are wholly different things, and mathematicians use "irrational" or "imaginary" in ways that are wholly their own. I think there is a legitimate question of whether Clancy was "insane" that is distinct both from whether she was merely "mentally ill" (someone with clinical depression is not necessarily "insane"), and whether she passed the bar of legally insane.
Of course, at this point we're basically on the same page on the facts, we're just litigating semantics.
Well, given that we're talking about an ongoing court case which hinges on the purported "insanity" of the defendant, I think we risk creating confusion if we describe Clancy as "insane" before that fact has been established in a court of law. There are various other near-synonymous terms which mean nothing in a legal context that we could use instead ("crazy", "psycho", "nutcase", "bunny boiler" etc.). But yes, this is really just a semantic debate.
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