Perhaps the rise and fall of George Santos was inevitable, just another sign of a desperate and credulous time.

The expulsion from the U.S. House of Representatives of the Republican from New York came more decisively than expected with more than 300 members—and almost half of the GOP caucus—voting to oust the fabulist who tried to sell fibs in a wholesale fashion. He was only the sixth person—and the first who had not been convicted of a crime or rebelled against the U.S. government—to be stripped of his seat.

Even the 114 who voted to keep Santos around didn’t do so out of any affection for him.

No, they worried that a vote for expulsion absent a criminal finding would set a dangerous precedent.

It’s easy to understand their thinking. If being caught lying becomes reason enough to unseat members of Congress, it could become difficult for the House to summon a quorum and conduct business.

The Republicans who opted to pitch Santos overboard did so because they couldn’t afford to carry his weight any longer.

The GOP holds a whisker-thin majority in the House. As the 2024 election season gathers steam, Republican congressional candidates feared with good reason that Democrats would make Santos the Botox-enhanced face—paid for with campaign funds—of the GOP.

It would not have been a good look.

Republicans from Santos’ home state had been screaming that ever since his vast array of deceptions had been revealed following his election in 2022. Party officials from his home district on Long Island began demanding his ouster almost as soon as the votes were counted because they knew his presence would weigh down every other Republican candidacy there.

So, it’s not surprising that so many Republicans determined Santos needed to be carried out with the trash.

A more interesting question is determining how Santos came to occupy his seat in the first place.

The American political landscape always has been littered with figures such as Santos, desperate characters who attempt to pass off fiction after fiction in their quests for attention and validation.

Most often, their stories are sad ones—tales of wounded human beings hungry to have voters fill holes in their lives opened by wrenching traumas.

Here in Indiana, I’ve covered such candidates.

One has run for office, on and off, for decades.

When I first encountered him, he traipsed into the newsroom where I worked at the time to talk with a few of us who wrote about politics. He talked at length about a fictitious family connection with a prominent Democratic Party operative and the marital troubles of a Republican elected official, among other fables he conjured up.

Newspapers were staffed more robustly in those days.

As soon as this Hoosier fabulist left the newsroom, we began placing calls to verify his claims.

Within an hour, we had determined that every one of them was a whopper. None of what he said made it into print—and the fact that he had spun so many lies with this made us extra careful both about fact-checking anything he said or giving him any ink.

That was then.

This is now.

Even though there were journalists who reported on Santos and his penchant for prevarication before he was elected, their work doesn’t have the reach or achieve the penetration with audiences newspapers once had.

Santos was able to exploit the struggles of the news business.

The result is that the citizens of his district for all practical purposes have been left without representation for almost a year. The rest of the nation has been saddled with a distraction our country could ill afford.

Santos, of course, isn’t the only politician to see the news coverage vacuum as an opportunity to sell lies as if they were candy bars. Many other candidates—including a certain former president facing multiple criminal charges—know they can stack fib upon fib with impunity, secure in the knowledge that, even when reported, their fabrications will do them little lasting harm.

George Santos rode into office because one of the safeguards protecting voters from purveyors of deceit has disintegrated.

His motivation for doing so likely was more pathetic than malicious, springing from a desire for once to be seen as worthy.

He is a figure to be pitied rather than feared.

The next time, we may not be so lucky