Former congressman George Santos, a New York Republican, was never a volleyball star. He also wasn’t a producer of the 2011 musical Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark. His mother didn’t die on 9/11. His grandparents didn’t flee from the Holocaust. He never worked on Wall Street. And he wasn’t the employer of several victims — or, as it turns out, any victims — of the mass shooting at the Pulse nightclub in Orlando.

This was, to put it mildly, a fairly odd string of lies for a politician to tell about himself. I can understand the ones about 9/11 and the Holocaust. But did he really think his political career would benefit from people thinking he’d been a big deal in the world of college volleyball? And why on earth did he pretend to have been involved in a notoriously disastrous Broadway flop?

The only way I can make it make sense is that Congressman Santos wanted above all to be an important or interesting person with some connection to news events that captured people’s attention. If so, he finally got his wish.