A sigh of relief. That was the collective feeling among political watchers of all stripes back in November of 2015 when Prime Minister Justin Trudeau announced his first cabinet. And the appointment of Harjit Sajjan as defence minister played a big role in that.

The consensus among everyone, Liberal voters and detractors alike, was that Trudeau with his razor slim resume was the weak link on his team. If the next four years of decisions were going to be informed by the social justice warrior in chief’s musings on how we “whip out our jets” or on the best ways to grow the economy “from the heart outwards”, we’d be in for a goofy and gaffe-prone term. The PM needed a strong cabinet to counterbalance his own weak spots.

Trudeau, to his credit, was able to corral an impressive roster of talent to run under the Liberal banner. People with top notch resumes were taking leaves from their plum jobs and putting their names forward. It paid off, because when the Liberals won an unexpectedly high number of seats, the incoming PM had a big talent pool to choose from.

The two picks that did the most to assuage these legitimate worries about Trudeau’s governing style were the ones for finance and defence. There were high hopes following the appointment of Bill Morneau that the business executive and former chairman of the fiscally conservative C.D. Howe Institute would rub off on Trudeau. Sadly, the opposite seems to have happened. But that’s a story for another day.

As for Harjit Sajjan, Canadians were wowed by his experience as an investigator with the Vancouver police and his time with the Canadian Forces in Afghanistan. Trudeau picked right with that one.

And while the high hopes placed in Morneau have fizzled out, Sajjan’s remained intact. He could have worn a lot of the blow back against pulling out our CF-18s from the ISIS fight. It was a hugely unpopular decision, going against what the Canadian people wanted. It was Trudeau who wore it though. Sajjan got out largely unscathed.

Even when we learned earlier this year that we’d been misled that our Iraqi allies were OK with the decisions – documents revealed they repeatedly asked Sajjan to get Trudeau to reconsider – this hurt the PM more than his minister.

All this is to say, from the beginning until just a few days ago, Sajjan was supposed to be one of the good ones. He was one of the few clearly sitting at the adults’ table.

Now that’s all been turned on its head with the news that Sajjan has, on more than one occasion, exaggerated his role in planning the Operation Medusa fight against the Taliban.

You just don’t do this. It is, as Conservative leader Rona Ambrose put it, “stolen valour”. Canadian Forces members and veterans are upset. Trust has been broken. Now the calls for him to resign are mounting from across the board.

This isn’t just bad for Sajjan. It’s bad for the whole cabinet and the country as a whole. No one ever placed much faith in, say, Stephane Dion as foreign affairs minister or Maryam Monsef in, well, any post, but Sajjan was different. He was supposed to raise the Liberals up.

Instead he’s now brought them down.