When the Benghazi inquiry came to a close yesterday, a wave of disappointment swept over conservative Washington. The House special committee chaired by Trey Gowdy was supposed to be the one that finally delivered the goods that seven prior congressional investigations couldn’t, the one that found proof that Hillary Clinton flew to Libya and killed Ambassador Chris Stevens and four other Americans with her bare hands (or something like that). And if one Republican investigation after another could find no malfeasance or criminal behavior, it can’t possibly be because there wasn’t any; the only possible explanation is that they weren’t looking hard enough, or they’re in on the conspiracy themselves.

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That’s what Dana Milbank found when he attended a gripe session of something called the Citizens’ Commission on Benghazi, where he learned that high-ranking GOP officials pressured Gowdy to let Clinton off the hook, and that Clinton and President Obama were running guns to Al-Qaeda in Libya, among other things. Those people’s ideas may be crazy, but how far are they from the rest of their party?

The fact is that even mainstream Republicans indulge the wackiest notions and the wackiest people on their side, and have for decades, and it renders them all but unable to distinguish between what’s actually worth going after their opponents about and what isn’t. Their presidential nominee loves a good conspiracy theory, and has no compunction about repeating everything he hears; it’s no accident that he regularly appears on the radio show of lunatic conspiracy theorist Alex Jones. It’s only a matter of time before Trump starts quoting from a tell-all book from a former Secret Service agent who says he saw all manner of debauchery during his time in the Clinton White House in the 1990s, despite the fact that he’s already been discredited; it’s this year’s version of Unlimited Access, the book by a former FBI agent who claimed that Hillary Clinton decorated the White House Christmas tree with crack pipes, among other fantastical tales.

It’s easy to understand why those books keep coming out: there’s gold in them thar hills. That Secret Service agent’s book is rocketing up the best-seller lists, and there’s always money to be made telling conservatives that their political opponents are engaged in all manner of conspiracies so evil that they might have been spit from the very fires of Hell. That market is sustained and fed by an entire industry devoted to telling conservatives what they want to hear: Fox News, conservative talk radio, a thousand web sites and email lists and other information sources. In that world, one thing you’ll never hear is, “Whatever else you might think about her, in this case, Clinton didn’t actually do anything wrong.”

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And that’s the real danger for them, the reason that seven or eight Benghazi investigations is never enough. The hatred that ferments inside the conservative information bubble for major Democratic Party figures is so pure that no collision with the facts will diminish it. That leaves Republicans unable to distinguish between a legitimate critique and a laughable one, particularly when it comes to what voters will find persuasive.

So they’re always shocked and amazed when the broader electorate doesn’t share their outrage. They couldn’t understand why the public didn’t support their impeachment of Bill Clinton, or why they didn’t reject Barack Obama over statements his former pastor had made. All through 2012 they refused to believe the polls that showed Obama leading Mitt Romney, because of course the public couldn’t possibly re-elect Obama when he was already halfway to destroying America.

As I wrote on Tuesday, the Benghazi investigation may have not validated all the old Benghazi conspiracy theories, but it did discover that Clinton had used a private email system while at the State Department. The hopes for Clinton’s downfall have been transferred to that subject, and if and when the FBI concludes what seems plain at this point — that using private email was foolish and a violation of departmental policy, but not actually a crime — they’ll be sure that the fix was in. What possible other explanation could there be?