I must confess… “fails to endorse” doesn’t really do this justice. The largest newspaper in New Jersey actually goes into full blown freak-out mode and essentially declares the governor to be insane. In case that sounds suspiciously like hyperbole to you, the title of their editorial includes the phrase, “Loses His Marbles.”

For months, we have wondered how Gov. Chris Christie thinks he can win the presidency when New Jersey is in such rotten shape after his six years in office. Now we may have our answer: The man has lost touch with reality.

In a national TV interview Monday, Christie was asked to explain why 65 percent of New Jersey voters think he’d make a bad president. His answer: We love him so much that we want him to remain our governor.

“They want me to stay,” he told Megyn Kelly of Fox News. “A lot of those people in that 65 percent want me to stay. And I’ve heard that from lots of people at town hall meetings.”

To be fair to the Star Ledger, that’s a pretty crazy thing to say. Chrstie’s numbers have been sagging since the beginning of Bridgegate and there were far better explanations – all more “tethered to Planet Earth” as the paper put it – than saying that the population of his state had signed on to some vast, Hidden Hand plan to keep him in New Jersey by telling pollsters that he would make a lousy president. I would guess that the boss and his staff somehow failed to anticipate the question before going on Megyn Kelly’s show and that’s what he came up with on the fly.

But the tone of this entire editorial is so over the top that you’d expect to find it in a tabloid rather than a supposedly mainstream, legitimate newspaper. They go on to say that Christie must exist in such a bubble that hard truths have a tough time penetrating. Launching criticism of an elected official’s policies or highlighting negative results is one thing. Petty name calling is another. The paper is also quick to repeatedly cite Bridgegate as one of the potential reasons that he needs to ask himself, “Why don’t people love me?”

Of course, the editors fail to mention that “Bridgegate” was such a big deal on the tip of everyone’s tongues largely because they ran one story after another on it like a rabid dog with a bone, long past the time when the well had gone dry in the Governor’s office. They similarly fail to note that after all of the media sturm und drang, the investigations cleared Christie of involvement. And why would they dwell on that inconvenient fact? The mission was accomplished in their eyes.

The article waits until the very end to get down to the business of non-endorsement.

It’s no wonder that New Jersey is screaming a warning to the rest of the country. God forbid he gets a chance to make an even bigger mess on a larger stage.

As I’ve written here in the past, it’s entirely possible that Chris Christie is politically wounded to the point where he’s no longer viable on the national level. If so, he’s brought some of the pain on himself, particularly when his natural tendencies on key policy issues enraged the conservative base and he essentially answered them with the back of his hand. But he had plenty of help from the liberal media, particularly in his home state. They not only didn’t want to see him ascend to the White House… they were still royally cheesed off that he was in the governor’s mansion. This display of squawking only proves the point of Christie’s defenders, though they may have already lost the larger war in this case.