Consistency.  The line below it used an absolute import so I changed it to be consistent.  As to absolute vs. relative I picked it out of preference/pep8:

> Relative imports for intra-package imports are highly discouraged. Always use the absolute package path for all imports. Even now that PEP 328 is fully implemented in Python 2.5, its style of explicit relative imports is actively discouraged; absolute imports are more portable and usually more readable.