This isn’t to suggest that Boyle herself is a hoax (though she does seem a bit too comfortable on that stage, parrying with Cowell, to be a complete naif). But the notion that Cowell was unaware of Boyle’s existence, let alone discordant looks and talent level, before she ever took the stage, is flatly ridiculous. And the song Boyle chose – if she, in fact, chose it – so seamlessly provides the meta-narrative that it’s easy to miss how calculated it is. From “Les Misérables” (“the miserable,” the way we are meant to perceive Boyle), she sings “I Dreamed a Dream.” Boyle opens on the second stanza: “I dreamed a dream in time gone by/When hope was high/And life worth living.” In “Les Misérables,” it’s sung by a lonely, unemployed character on the fringes – just like Boyle, who sang with the undignified descriptor “unemployed, 47” slung across the bottom of the screen…

Most disturbing of all, perhaps, is that not since Saturday has Susan Boyle been Susan Boyle. It’s a permutation of the Heisenberg principle: That 30 million people have heard her, seen her, embraced her has already changed who she is. The shy churchgoer who said that her recently deceased mother encouraged her to “take the risk,” who admitted in her audition that she has never been kissed, who has forever lived as something of an accidental outcast – she now seems too much of this world. “I’ve been for a meeting with Sony BMG, but I can’t say much about it,” she said this week. “It’s early days.” Susan Boyle is now one of us. And that is really a shame.