I can’t pretend to speak for the rest of the staff here at National Review, but when Representative George Santos surrendered to authorities today in New York, I shed a manly tear the same I way did when I first saw that freeze-frame at the end of Butch Cassidy & The Sundance Kid: the fearless rebel, finally ground down by the intractable authority of The Man, and yet no heroic ending this time. Santos’s appointment with the law came like a dastardly ambush, from multiple angles: Wire fraud (7 charges), money laundering (3), theft of public funds (1), and making materially false statements (2), all adding up to an unlucky 13 federal counts from the Department of Justice for our loveably beleaguered multi-aliased Republican con(gress)man from Long Island.

The charges look bleak indeed. I’d long held out hopes that after being caught faking his work, educational, and ethnic history George Santos was on the verge of that big Catch Me If You Can Hollywood turnaround, but I fear it is not to be. Now he’s been caught buying designer clothing with campaign funds and engaging in Covid-19 unemployment insurance fraud, surely the seediest of all non-telemarketing frauds to be caught engaging in.

One reason for Santos’s meteoric rise from shady grifter to congressman is that none of this was supposed to happen to him in the first place, at least not as he had calculated it. He never intended to win. This is a style of con that amateurs may recognize as a variant of The Producers: Santos’s game was a calibrated one mostly known to electoral specialists (but well known to us), where a candidate runs not to win, but rather to raise their Q-rating or “raise funds.” What the candidate then does with said funds? Beats me, but as any given Evan McMullin campaign veteran might tell you, it sure isn’t “paying the vendors.” This play relies upon running as a no-hoper in a district so impossibly out-of-reach as to not draw serious media scrutiny into the no-hoper’s background.

Santos never expected a genuine spotlight. He was running for the GOP nomination in New York’s 3rd district back when it had been drawn into a wildly Democratic-leaning gerrymander; only later, when the New York state court overturned the over-ambitious 2021 Democratic congressional gerrymander and imposed its own map instead, did this district revert back to its formerly competitive status.

If it seems like a daring public move to expose oneself like this, it is – it is in fact sociopathic, just so we’re clear – and yet it happens more often than people think (ask longtime Colorado Republicans about the Dan Maes experience). This was clearly a gamble that rolled snake eyes – Santos must have been deeply nonplussed when the New York Court of Appeals suddenly handed him a winnable race – but he kept on regardless. This brings me to another simple truth: Many people are dumb. Dumb people, predictably, lack foresight. It might be obvious to you or me that a guy living a life already entirely constructed out of paper-mâché risked exposure should he continue onward in his quest for office. It rather evidently was not so to George Santos.

Serious matters aside, what they can’t indict George Santos for is fearlessly living, and then concealing, his truth. Some criticize Santos for neglecting to mention an actual past marriage on the campaign trail — a marriage to a woman, that is — but I ask you not to misunderstand the man’s heart: George Santos is still as fiercely gay as he was back when he was a Rio de Janeiro drag queen performing under the nom–de-diva “Kitara Ravache.” This marriage could be easily explained as an apparent green-card marriage, done to skirt U.S. immigration laws. That’s my man George, who well understands that laws are best recognized in the breach rather than the observance.

You may choose to remember George Santos as the fraudster Republican congressman brought low by multiple campaign-finance violations. I choose to remember George Santos as the man who acquired the only relevant experience any lawmaker should ever need with Goldman Sachs by inserting it as a line on his résumé. You may think of George Santos as the man who falsely claimed he was Jewish in heavily Jewish Long Island. I choose to think of the man who turned a Larry David-level Seinfeld gag into reality by quibbling that he really meant that he was “Jew-ish,” – you know, just into the whole scene and all. He is not the congressman we need; he is most assuredly the one we deserve, and seem to vote for over and over again.

Anyway, even though Representative Santos has filed for reelection and remains as yet in office, I bid him a fair “Vaya con Dios” regardless. He was a man (at least outside of Brazil): take him for all in all, we shall not look upon his like again.

Until the 119th Congress, at the very least.