George Santos used to be Jewish. Now, he says, he’s “Jew-ish” and has always been Catholic. This is not the least of it.

In November’s midterms, Santos flipped New York’s 3rd District from Democratic to Republican. Since then, much of the biography in his campaign materials has been exposed as false.

It is true that Santos’s win makes him the first openly gay Republican to win a seat in the House as a non-incumbent, and the first Brazilian American in Congress.

It is also true that Santos’s story is, as he insists, the “embodiment of the American Dream” — only not in the way he means it.

In America, winning matters more than how you win. Image counts for more than reality. Just as the wish is father to the dream, so, the logic goes, the dream can become reality — one way or another.

This is not a recipe for honesty in public life. Dreaming big can lead to dreaming too hard and letting the facts run away from you. Not for nothing does America have such lenient bankruptcy laws.

Why, even our President is on tape claiming to have “graduated with three degrees from undergraduate school”, won a “full academic scholarship”, and “ended up in the top half of my class”.

None of which is true. That was in 1987, shortly before Joe Biden’s first run for the Democratic nomination derailed when it emerged that his campaign materials pirated his biography from Neil Kinnock’s autobiography.

It took decades for public life to decline to the point that Biden was again a serious candidate, but Americans are nothing if not progress-minded, so they got there in the end. America’s reality principle always was a bit shaky.

The Santos saga exemplifies its collapse.

The son of Brazilian immigrants, George Santos claimed to have attended the private Horace Mann School, Baruch College and New York University. None of these institutions can find attendance records with his name and birth date. Santos now admits that he never graduated from any college.

After not graduating, Santos proceeded to not work as an “associate asset manager” in Citigroup’s real estate division and at Goldman Sachs. When neither Citigroup nor Goldman Sachs could confirm this, Santos attributed his claims to “a poor choice of words”.

Santos worked for a couple of small financial firms. One of them, Harbor City, ended up on the wrong end of a suit from the Securities and Exchange Commission, which accused Harbor City and its founder of running a $17 million Ponzi scheme. Santos was not named in the suit, and denies any knowledge of the alleged scheme.

As Santos ascended this non-existent corporate ladder, he founded a charity, Friends of Pets United. Or perhaps he did not.

The IRS and the attorney generals’ offices of New York and New Jersey can find no record of a charity in this name having tax-exempt status.

He also claimed to be Jewish, a lot. The 3rd District overlaps parts of Long Island and Queens, and has plenty of Jewish voters. It can’t have hurt his chances. These are the wages of identity politics, which Santos may yet cash in. Santos claimed his maternal grandfather, whose surname was Zabrovsky, escaped from Ukraine to Belgium, where he met Santos’s grandmother, and that they then fled to Brazil in 1940.

He also described his mother as “an immigrant from Belgium” and attributed her maiden name, Devolder, to a “Dutch” connection.

Santos’s 2020 campaign website said that his mother was Jewish, and that her parents escaped from the Nazis. In fact, her parents were born in Brazil in 1918 and 1927.

Santos didn’t invent his Jewish connection out of whole cloth. He just embroidered it beyond all plausibility for electoral gain. If he’d stopped at being “Jewish-adjacent”, or “Goldman-adjacent” for that matter, he would probably have got away with it.

The drive to win at all costs, to inhabit the image of success, pushed him too far. The Republican Jewish Coalition is especially peeved.

“My sins here are embellishing my resumé,” Santos now claims. That’s one way of looking at it, and a very American way. Another is that this kind of serial imposture is what you get when the winner takes all, when politics is a business for fantasists, and when there is little consequence for dishonesty in public life.

Santos deceived his voters. Should he have been allowed to take his seat in Congress? The truth is, that’s exactly where he belongs.