The House’s impeachment debate on Wednesday held surprises for few across party lines – including for viewers of Fox News.

For most of the day, the president’s favorite channel covered the debate straight; the vast majority of the afternoon deferred to the live feed of the House floor. News anchors such as Chris Wallace and Bret Baier would occasionally jump in with commentary, largely to signpost the oft-used “historic” label and the debate’s deep partisan schism. “No matter what you think of the president, after today we will never talk about the 45th president of the United States the same way again,” Baier said.

Fox News during the House debate. Photograph: YouTube

For six hours, Republican and Democratic House members debated the two articles of impeachment in alternating 60- to 90-second soundbites. Wallace coolly pointed to pertinent questions: how many Democrats would break ranks with the party on the impeachment vote and who would be appointed as impeachment floor managers for a Senate trial in the new year?

Baier, meanwhile, commented on how the debate offered “one of those split-screen moments” highlighting two starkly different political worlds.

But at 5pm ET – as the debate still rumbled on – Fox News’ broadcast switched to one of its talkshows and one of those partisan worlds crashed through the looking glass. The staid news reports mutated into rightwing conspiracy theories as the network pivoted to The Five, its panel commentary show hosted by Greg Gutfeld, Dana Perino, Juan Williams and Jesse Watters with guest Katie Pavlich.

To the panel, the impeachment debate, which continued in the background, was neither somber nor serious; it was a sham, one not even historic, despite being only the third time a president was impeached.

Watters claimed Democrats “loved” impeachment and mocked House speaker Nancy Pelosi’s invocation of the American flag. “The Democrats talking about they’re doing this for the flag – they burn flags. They kneel when the flags go up,” Watters said. “And they’re talking about the constitution? When have we ever heard Democrats strictly adhering to the constitution. Never. The whole thing is fake.”

The Five’s conversation took little inspiration from the debate, instead sticking to the usual vocabulary list: fake news, sham, Democratic “rage”.

Watters claimed there was no evidence for the impeachment articles (the House judiciary committee detailed their evidence in 658 pages released on Monday) and called Trump’s damning 25 July phone call with Ukraine a “fake whistleblower story” in a rant that also worked in the words “Russia”, “hoax” and “witch-hunt”.

The lone dissenter to the impeachment-as-scam consensus was Williams, who noted the Democrats’ evidence. “The problem here is Republican blindness to facts of a real case,” he said.

Pavlich used Williams’ allegiance to facts as an opportunity to pivot the conversation to Hillary Clinton – who remains the favored bug bear of the rightwing, despite her 2016 loss and exit from politics.

“Let’s talk about some facts,” Pavlich said, claiming (inaccurately) that Clinton hired foreign help to get information on candidates in the 2016 election.

Pavlich ended her time by, in classic Fox form, funneling outrage from Trump to Clinton. “If she were to win, which she didn’t, she would’ve had to have been impeached over that,” Pavlich claimed, “because that is far worse than anything the president said in his phone call.”