_The early hours of Friday morning: a dark and empty auditorium at the University of North Florida, in Jacksonville. Voices are heard. A venerable political journalist and a cub reporter walk across the stage and stop before what, at first sight, appears to be a large rectangular wooden block. On closer inspection it is a vast human skull, still bloodied.

Cub reporter: “That same skull, sir, was, sir, Newt’s skull, the G.O.P.’s jester.”

Bigfoot: “This?”

Cub Reporter: “E’en that.”

The venerable journalist picks up the skull and looks at it closely. Then he cries out:

“Alas, poor Newt! I knew him, Horatio, a fellow of infinite jest, of most excellent fancy. He hath bore me on his back a thousand times, and now, how abhorred in my imagination it is! My gorge rims at it.”

Just five days ago, following his big victory in South Carolina, Newt Gingrich looked set to roar into Florida and transform the Republican primary campaign. Instead, he has had his head handed to him. At one-thirty this morning, Intrade, the political betting site, was putting the probability of him winning the nomination at just eight per cent, and the probability of Mitt Romney getting to take on Barack Obama at ninety-two per cent.

Betting markets, like all futures markets, are far from infallible. In this case, though, I think they have it right. With the Florida polls having swung against Newt after a lackluster performance in Monday’s debate, and with the Republican establishment turning on him in savage fashion, he desperately needed a strong performance last night. But an event that the media, myself included, had billed as the debate of the year turned out to be a big disappointment—unless, that is, you are Romney or one of his supporters. “I thought it was a terrific night,” the Mittster said to CNN’s Gloria Borger as he left the Jacksonville stage, sporting a grin as wide as a Cheshire cat’s. “I think it’s going to give me the boost I need in the remaining couple of days of the election.”

From Gingrich, there was no comment, which was pretty much what he had offered up all night. From the first question, about immigration, to the last one, about why he was the man to beat Obama, he said virtually nothing that was new, funny, or of particular note. He didn’t even attack the press. Or, rather, he did try to once or twice, but Wolf Blitzer, CNN’s host, smacked him down, and he stayed smacked.

When that happens, you know there is something badly wrong. Where was the fiery Newt of Myrtle Beach and Charleston, the man whose verbal fusillades had taken down Juan Williams and John King, whose fulminations about Bain Capital and undisclosed tax returns had transformed his rival into a stuttering wreck? In his place, there was a withdrawn and sullen fellow who repeatedly complained about unfair attacks against him, while missing numerous opportunities to stick it to Romney. Instead of George Foreman beating his opponent to a pulp, we got John McEnroe complaining about the line calls and how long his opponent was taking between points. But where McEnroe used to whine and cuss himself into a fury and then play better, Newt whined and flubbed it.

Toward the end, Blitzer, who had asked him tough questions all night, finally gave him a break, inquiring of Romney how he could seriously claim to be the heir to Ronald Reagan. Mitt, who didn’t join the Republican Party until the early nineties and who voted for Paul Tsongas in the 1992 Democratic Presidential primary, tried to dodge the question, saying he was still a businessman when Reagan was in office.

Rather than seizing on the opportunity to portray Romney as a flip-flopper and a phony, Gingrich moaned about “the Romney attack machine,” which has run ads questioning his ties to Reagan. When he finally brought up the Tsongas quote and a 1994 statement from Romney, who’d said that he didn’t want to go back to the Reagan-Bush years, he stepped on his own message by once again complaining about Romney and his minions distorting his record. If I didn’t mishear him, he even said he believed Romney’s story that he had genuinely grown more conservative over the years, rather than tempering his views for political reasons. And he also let stand a claim from Romney that he has never voted Democrat when there was a Republican on the ballot. It was left to Larry Sabato, a professor of politics at the University of Virginia, to point out that Romney was probably fibbing. “3/10/92,” Sabato tweeted. “Voted for Tsongas on same day Bush 41 was facing P. Buchanan.”

For the second time in a row, Romney’s advance team had done an excellent job. In Tampa, they had prevailed on NBC to silence the crowd. In Jacksonville, with no noise restrictions in effect, they somehow packed the room with Mitt supporters. Romney’s new debate coach, Brett O’Donnell, who used to work for Michele Bachmann, had also done his prep, which evidently included injecting his charge with a shot of amphetamines. After Gingrich suggested that Romney was the most anti-immigration candidate left in the field, he erupted in faux anger and demanded an apology. And when Newt stupidly brought up some investments that Mitt had made in Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac—bonds purchased by his family trusts—he quickly turned the question around, pointing out that Newt, for years, had “been promoting Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to the tune of $1.6 million.”

Rick Santorum did a more effective job than Newt of getting under Mitt’s skin. He (correctly) accused the former Massachusetts governor of misleading people about the health-care reform he got passed, pointing out that its individual mandate to purchase insurance “is the same as Barack Obama’s mandate,” and he jabbed at him (and Newt) for supporting the loathed bank bailouts. Capping a strong performance that will have reminded some conservative Floridians that he is still in the race, he also rolled out his pitch as the cultural conservative who can win over swing voters in states like Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Ohio.

Newt, for his part, looked increasingly forlorn. His performance was so dismal it demands explanation. I can only suspect that, after several days of relentless attacks from all corners of the Republican Party, from figures as far apart as Bob Dole and Elliot Abrams, he knew he was finished even before he stepped on the stage. In retrospect, his ludicrous proposal to establish a lunar colony by 2020 was a sign of desperation.

At least it gave the press hordes something to laugh about. During the debate, my colleague Ryan Lizza, demob-happy from his big piece on Obama in this week’s magazine, started a lunar pun contest on Twitter. Shortly before Blitzer drew the proceedings drew to a close, Toby Harnden of the London Daily Mail commented in a tweet that Newt looked like “he wishes he were on the moon.”

Who knows? Maybe dispatching Newt on such a mission isn’t a wholly fanciful notion. During the Iowa primary, Sheldon Adelson was persuaded to sink millions of dollars into a stumbling effort to turn him into the President. Perhaps Adelson could now be persuaded to finance a lunar mission with Newt as one of the astronauts. At one point last night, the Georgian said he’s been interested in interplanetary travel since the late fifties, when “Space and Rockets was a separate magazine.”

Ah, Newt! The things he says. If this is the end, we’re going to miss him—sort of.

Photo by Paul J. Richards/AFP/Getty Images.