Alan Warrick was concerned about the public and had a cautionary tale to share.

That’s what the District 2 councilman told his loyal Facebook followers on Friday night.

Warrick wrote that he had been out the night before at a bar with friends when “someone slipped some type of drug” into one of his drinks, resulting in the councilman being found by security detail Friday morning, passed out on a park bench in front of City Hall.

Warrick couched his anecdote as a kind of public-service announcement, stating that he had spoken with the Express-News and “encouraged them to write about this so that people can be aware that even if you are with friends and even if you are in a familiar place this can still happen to you.”

For all his avowed concern about what had been done to him, however, Warrick did not get tested to find out what drugs were in his system. He did not contact the bar before making his allegation and find out if anyone there saw any suspicious activity. With no evidence to back him up, he presented himself as a victim.

By Saturday afternoon, Warrick’s story had crumbled. Justin Vitek, the owner of On the Rocks, the downtown basement bar where Warrick had spent Thursday night, said the councilman appeared sufficiently drunk that the staff cut him off and offered to call him an Uber. Vitek also said that he and his staff would review the bar’s surveillance video to see what turned up. Suddenly, Warrick recanted his story and conceded that he’d had too much to drink.

Nonetheless, many of Warrick’s followers continued to show their solidarity with the councilman, with one supporter suggesting on Facebook that Warrick deserved praise for “stepping up and taking responsibility” for his actions.

Taking responsibility is a voluntary decision. Warrick’s honesty was involuntary. His first reaction was to conjure up a dubious story and he walked it back only in the face of embarrassing pushback, and the possibility of damaging video evidence.

From the very beginning, Warrick’s account carried a suspicious odor to it. For one thing, his Facebook claim that he “encouraged” the Express-News to run the story made it sound as if he volunteered the information.

In fact, Express-News reporter Josh Baugh got the tip from elsewhere and was going to write the story, regardless of any “encouragement” from Warrick. When Baugh called him at 5:03 p.m. on Friday, Warrick struggled to explain what had happened. Only after planning out a messaging strategy with his campaign team did he call Baugh back at 6:14 and push the I-was-drugged story, which he furthered with his Facebook post 51 minutes later.

If Warrick had explained the incident by saying he didn’t remember exactly what happened and didn’t know how he ended up crashed out on the bench, most of us could understand that. But the councilman, whose personal history includes DUI guilty pleas in 2002 and 2004, took the path of deflection and diversion.

“Myself and my team, we looked at the circumstances, and it seemed too unlikely that I would just end up at City Hall on the bench, literally right where I park,” Warrick said Tuesday, by way of explaining his initial allegation. “Also, it was such a long period of time where I have no recollection and I didn’t have a hangover.”

His fictional story was a tour de force of irresponsibility, throwing suspicion in the direction of his runoff opponent Cruz Shaw (with a cryptic assertion that “someone wanted to see me asleep outside City Hall”), damaging the bar’s reputation and chipping away at the credibility of legitimate drugging victims.

This society has a big enough challenge getting people to seriously confront the issue of date and acquaintance rape, and the role that drink spiking plays in it. The last thing we need is a politician making unfounded allegations about being drugged in order to salvage his runoff campaign.

You learn a lot about politicians by how they handle public embarrassment. Rob Ford, the late Toronto mayor, offered a worst-case example when he responded to questions about his crack-cocaine use by attacking the media and accusing a Toronto Star reporter of being a pedophile.

Warrick didn’t go that far. But there’s no charitable way to say that all his talk about protecting others from being drugged was nothing more than a ploy to protect his own name from being dragged through the mud.

ggarcia@express-news.net

Twitter: @gilgamesh470