It's time for Dr. Ben Carson to quit the presidential race.

Having been present at its creation – I was in attendance at the National Prayer Breakfast along with President Barack Obama when Carson delivered his now famous criticism of Obamacare that launched his boomlet – I think I may be a little more qualified than most of the other members of the Washington punditocracy to spot its end point.

His candidacy was always something of lark anyway; his precipitous rise in the polls came at a time when the bilious billionaire from the five boroughs, Donald Trump, was starting to lose his appeal. It's all well and good to talk about needing to build a fence, making the Mexicans pay for it, and having to be a sharp negotiator to deal with the Chinese, but that can only take you so far. For his part, Carson never seemed to manage even that much – but he did give a voice to those across the country who are justifiably angry with Washington, with the president's failure to lead, and with the way in which congressional Republicans have been unable to accomplish most any of the things they promised they would do.

The ideal of the citizen-politician, which Carson represents more than anyone else, is a far cry from the reality of what it would be like with him in the White House. He could fake it for a while but it's not clear he's even capable of assembling a team of advisers to run his administration with any kind of competence.

If you're wondering how we can know that at this stage, just look at the people around him in his campaign – not who they are as individuals, necessarily, but what they have not done, which is to make Carson a serious candidate, something that is abundantly different from having a lead in national and state polls.

Carson's latest kerfuffle, which seem to be occurring with increasing frequency as people take a closer look at him, appeared Friday in Politico. The piece, which you can read for yourself, claims the candidate now admits the claim in his autobiography that he was offered but turned down an appointment to the United States Military Academy at West Point was a fabrication.

If that were true, that should be enough to put an end to his campaign. Republicans do not and should not let the lies and shifting explanations former Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton tells about her email stand unchallenged; the GOP should not tolerate similar disassembling from within its own ranks of presidential hopefuls.

What if it's not true? Should Carson still quit the race? What if the Politico story is a drive-by hit committed by the mainstream media using opposition research leaked to it by one of the other campaigns? Over at DailyWire.com, writer Ben Shapiro posted a convincing counter-argument to the basic thesis of the Politico piece not long after it appeared that puts a big question mark to the allegation of fabrication.

For his own good, Carson should quit the race. He's not having an impact on the policy discussions and his presence is distorting the results of the national and state polls. Most of all, if he stays in the political-media machine is going to continue to pick and poke at him and chew him up until there is nothing left. The assaults upon him for asserting none of the Founding Fathers had elected experience or that the Biblical Joseph had the great pyramids of Egypt built to store grain during a period of famine have been mild compared to what is waiting for him they next time he slips.

The people around him were apparently able to get the West Point story knocked down quickly enough, but if they were real pros they should have been able to squelch it entirely beforehand. At the very least, they would have made sure it appeared without anything in it suggesting the candidate had admitted he lied. That they didn't says a lot about the kind of team he's put together, not much of it good, which allows us to infer the team he will assemble to run his White House might be equally weak. The country was damaged badly by Barack Obama's extended period of on-the-job training. We don't need to repeat that experience again, no matter who wins the election.