Ted Cruz just fired his top national spokesman for spreading a false story about Marco Rubio.

Citing “a grave error in judgment,” the Republican presidential candidate told reporters Monday afternoon that he had asked for the resignation of his campaign’s communications director, Rick Tyler. On Saturday, the day of the South Carolina primary, Tyler had posted on social media a link to a story with a video of Marco Rubio making a comment to a Cruz staffer who was reading the Bible. The audio on the video was unclear, but the transcript that accompanied it showed Rubio making a disparaging remark to the staffer about the Bible, saying there were “not many answers in it.”

Rubio said he was in fact praising the Bible—that he’d said, “All the answers are in there”—and on Monday, the newspaper that made the original transcription updated its story to say that the audio was unclear. Rubio’s campaign promptly accused Tyler and Cruz of playing dirty tricks. Tyler apologized on Facebook for posting "an inaccurate story” about Rubio:

I want to apologize to Senator Marco Rubio for posting an inaccurate story about him here earlier today. The story... Posted by Rick Tyler on Sunday, February 21, 2016

Tyler later went on Fox News to amplify his apology, but it apparently wasn’t enough for Cruz. “I had made clear in this campaign that we will conduct this campaign with the very highest standards of integrity,” Cruz told reporters, according to The Daily Beast’s Gideon Resnick.

That has been how we've conducted it from day one. It is why when other campaigns attack us personally, impugn my integrity or my character, I don't respond in kind. None of you have heard me throw the kind of insults at Marco Rubio that he throws at me every single day. If other candidates choose to go into the gutter, we will not do the same. Rick Tyler's a good man. This was a grave error of judgment. It turned out the news story he sent around was false, but I'll tell you, even if it was true, we are not a campaign that is going to question the faith of another candidate.

Cruz made the decision rather abruptly. Tyler, who hasn’t commented yet, was tweeting on behalf of his campaign as of an hour before the announcement and was reportedly about to go on MSNBC just before Cruz told reporters of his sacking. Campaign staffers have been spared for doing a lot worse than spreading false stories about opponents, and the Rubio-Bible flap arguably wasn’t even the most problematic thing Cruz’s campaign has done in the last few weeks.