The Madelung electric fields report direction on the electrostatic forces that atoms and molecules experience in solution and at the interface. For this reason, the Madelung electric field is most relevant to our understanding of molecular and chemical dynamics at the molecular scale. It follows that the electrostatic potential derived from a single average net charge density field, including Gouy-Chapman and related theories, provides an incomplete and potentially erroneous depiction of the fields that act on species at the interface. This is not to say that this class of theories are not useful. Indeed, Poisson and Gouy-Chapman profiles provide a wealth of physical intuition into the thermodynamic consequences of Coulombic interactions. Nonetheless, the act of conditioning the electrostatic calculation on the presence of a species has a significant qualitative impact on the apparent properties of the potential and electric field profiles.