What to do about Chris Christie? He is impossible to embrace or respect and yet also, infuriatingly, impossible to reject altogether. He combines a history of evident unreliability, cynicism, and occasional outright political grotesquery with — uniquely among the current presidential field — the ability to pound Donald Trump in a direct and rhetorically effective way. He is an effective communicator, and although I doubt his electoral strategy will rate him anything better than a New Hampshire primary finish a notch or two higher than the last go-round, it is refreshing to hear someone taking it hammer-and-tongs to Donald Trump for all the right reasons. He did it again today, with his appearance before the Faith & Freedom Coalition’s “Road to Majority” conference, an enormous political confab where nearly every candidate gave an address. (Enjoy this link, for it means you will have to skip through the scintillating boredom of Miami Mayor Francis “¿Quién es?” Suarez.)

And yet, there was a curiously missing center to Chris Christie’s address that made the entire thing ring with the sort of clangingly hollow bravado that has come to characterize his career: Several minutes into an address devoted (after the requisite political reintroduction) to the subject of character and admission of mistakes, Christie mentioned that he was the first major 2016 presidential candidate to endorse Donald Trump, and I briefly perked up because I thought this might turn into a genuinely fascinating public moment of truth, a moment when the former governor “grasped the nettle,” so to speak, and explained why he so wholeheartedly endorsed Trump in the first place.

Instead, he used it as an applause line. As a way of building his bona fides for the real point, which was “so that’s why I’m running for president against the guy I endorsed last time around.” His argument was certainly reasonable enough as far as it went: Trump’s constant refusal to take any responsibility for, or publicly acknowledge, his own mistakes makes him a wildly unfit man to be president.

And yet where was Chris Christie, in a speech about the importance of admitting error, answering for his mistakes with anything other than the grim punch line of “and that’s why I’m running for president again”? I kept waiting for that moment, and it never came. I certainly hope it will at some point in the near future. Is the governor capable of explaining straightforwardly why he was indeed the first major candidate to endorse Donald Trump in 2016? What did he see in his character as revealed up until that point on the campaign trail to inspire his sudden, and remarkably public, show of loyalty? What human qualities, perhaps unknown to us voters at arm’s length, made him decide Trump was morally fit for the presidency, or even as the avatar for the Republican Party to take on Hillary Clinton in November?

These questions — the answers to which one can only speculate at — gnaw at me, but only because they have already long since finished hollowing out the moral core and rationale of Christie’s candidacy. The reason why today’s speech even deserves notice — for I do not anticipate the Christie campaign taking off either nationwide or even in New Hampshire, though I’ve surely been wrong before — is that to watch it is to reflect upon something of a political tragedy. I want to believe in Chris Christie. He talks an extremely good game, one whose rhetorical thrust and regular-guy locutional style is tuned directly to my own communicational frequencies. He comes across as in command of any given issue in blessed contrast to Trump, a man who knows his brief. One might even say that Chris Christie knows exactly what he is doing.

But it is far too easy to remind oneself after a moment’s worth of reflection that it is ultimately all only a skilled imposture, with a resoundingly hollow center. For all his well-wrought bluster and middle-ground rhetoric, Chris Christie has never been able to reassure me or most others that he holds to any core political principle other than his own self-aggrandizement. I suspect if you asked him privately why he was running, Christie would answer with some variation on “because someone’s gotta say it, and I’m better at saying it than any of these other palookas.” (This is actually the publicly stated rationale for his candidacy, so I take no creative liberties.) The first half of that proposition is undeniably true, however electorally suicidal. The second clause is deeply suspect though, because Christie himself is a flawed vessel that quickly implodes under the heavy pressure of his own hypocrisies.

It’s not that I doubt Christie’s rhetorical abilities, but for a man who took to the stage today to speak about the importance of admitting mistakes and how it relates to inner character, he refused to admit any of the former, and thus failed to demonstrate any of the latter. Chris Christie seems to believe that his very act of running for the presidency is some kind of moral expiation, an acknowledgement of his mistake about Trump’s fitness for office. “I guessed catastrophically wrong about this man, so here’s my way of saying I’m sorry: more of me!” That was the unavoidable subtext of this speech, which in its particulars was laudable but which could not help but turn to ashes in the mouth of the specific man delivering it.

I suppose in that sense then the question asked at the outset answers itself: The best thing to do about Chris Christie is to ignore him and wait for his candidacy to inevitably capsize and sink to the bottom. It will have been earned.