All functions from the audioop module that work on stereo fragments, provide the same behaviour on multichannel (i.e. 5.1 channel LPCM) fragments. This is, however, not true for the tomono() function, that only makes sense when supplied with a 2-channel fragment.

Therefore, I suggest adding an extra function to the module that demultiplexes any N-channel fragment and returns a given channel as mono fragment:
audioop.demux(fragment, width, nChannels, channel)

When, for example, applied to a 16 bit stereo fragment, audioop.demux(fragment, 2, 2, 0) would give the same result as audioop.tomono(fragment, 2, 1.0, 0).