I first encountered Roy Moore in 2002 in a Montgomery, Ala., courtroom, where I was an expert witness on the separation of church and state in what came to be known as the Alabama Ten Commandments case. Moore, then the state’s chief justice , was the defendant. He had installed a granite block emblazoned with the Ten Commandments in the rotunda of the Judicial Building in Montgomery, declared that the event marked “the restoration of the moral foundation of law to our people and the return to the knowledge of God in our land” and then refused to allow any other religious representations in that public space.

“Roy’s Rock” represented a clear violation of the establishment clause of the First Amendment, and Moore was being sued for so blatantly flouting the Constitution. He was silent that day in the courtroom, but he had already made a great deal of noise about the United States being a Christian nation. One of his arguments was that the founders were aware of no religion other than Christianity, and therefore, the First Amendment gave only Christians the right to free exercise.

That statement, of course, was demonstrably, ridiculously false. But that’s Roy Moore. The Republican Senate nominee has fashioned an entire career out of subterfuge and self-misrepresentation — as a constitutional authority, as a Baptist and as a spokesman for evangelical values. The recent allegations of sexual misconduct, together with his many specious statements over the years — that the First Amendment guarantees religious freedom only for Christians, for example, or that many communities in the United States stagger under the burden of Islamic sharia law — underscore both his hypocrisy and his tenuous grasp of reality.