On Earth, FBI Director James Comey’s condemnation of Hillary Clinton’s careless, even negligent, use of an insecure private e-mail server while secretary of state would have dealt a crippling blow to Clinton’s campaign for president.

Unfortunately for Republicans, they chose the candidate from Mars to run against her.

Perhaps no day between now and November will better demonstrate the folly of Republican primary voters who ignored basically everything known about reality-TV show host and sometime real-estate developer Donald Trump who bears their standard. One thing that dominated the headlines, and one story largely overlooked amid the tumult, will tell the tale of the election.

The headline, of course, was Comey’s announcement that the FBI won’t recommend charging the Democratic nominee for president with any crime in connection with the e-mail server. The ignored story was that crews on a doomed EgyptAir flight that went down over the Mediterranean Sea in May battled a fire for at least three minutes before the plane and its 66 passengers and crew were lost, which came to light yesterday after the plane’s voice recorder was recovered.

“ What happens if Trump — his phrase, not mine — bombs the s--- out of someone and then has to say “never mind”? ”

The GOP’s dilemma is that it wants to run against Clinton on the argument that the e-mails, like various scandals (trumped-up and otherwise) over her 38 years in public life, show a lack of judgment and character, but it has to use Trump to press the argument.

And we thought The Donald was out of the business of making us laugh on TV.

Put simply, if you want to make a truthfulness argument against your rival, it’s best not to nominate someone whose very campaign has only ever been plausible because of the fiction that he’s worth $10 billion. Trump is, on every day of his campaign, a walking lie, a grotesque experiment assessing whether you can fool some people all the time.

And if you want to make an argument that a rival can’t be trusted, try to nominate someone who has been sued fewer than Trump’s hundreds of times for not paying their debts. Or someone with less of a talent for consistently hiring contractors whose shoddy work demands that they not get paid, a lame and transparently false excuse that so-called slow pays, including Trump, use all the time. And that’s before Democrats even raise his shameful record of running a casino company — the four bankruptcies, the bragging that he put his own interests ahead of shareholders’ and the like.

The e-mail episode makes all the case one could really want to make against Clinton, balanced against a record of accomplishment at the State Department notably less impressive than that of her successor, John Kerry. At least eight e-mail chains contained top-secret information that should never have been handled on e-mail systems lacking the heavy-duty security such data demand. Many of Clinton’s defenses of how she used the server aren’t true, Comey said. And the reason Clinton used the server in the first place is a lame argument that meanies in Congress and the press would subpoena her state.gov e-mail account and invade her privacy, the latest variation of a complaint she has made in one form or another since at least 1995. Poor baby. She chose politics, which never was an occupation for the privacy-obsessed.

How will Trump handle his business empire if elected?

Bad judgment, check. Lying, apparent check. Failure to stop making the same mistake that Clinton has made for decades — a really bad sign for any executive — check.

If she were running against, say, John Kasich, an experienced manager and generally acknowledged grownup, she’d be wide open to the attack that E-Mail-Gate needn’t be a crime to remain a cogent argument that she lacks the judgment for the job. Whether Clinton’s e-mail management was disqualifying would be up to voters.

Coming from Trump, she’ll swat the argument away in a debate zinger or two. “Donald, you wouldn’t be here if it weren’t for lies,” she’ll say, and then she’ll dismantle him. In two minutes, voters will conclude that the other guy’s no better.

At the same time, the EgyptAir news of a fire breaking out several minutes before the plane went down suggests that Trump’s snap assessment that the lost flight was obviously the result of terrorism was wrong. It clearly was premature, as ex-Defense Secretary Robert Gates said at the time. Given his demands that the U.S. be “tough” and “vigilant” — and his calls for trade wars with China, killing the families of ISIS combatants and, crazily, a shooting war with Mexico over his border wall — what might a President Trump have done by now? What happens if Trump — his phrase, not mine — bombs the s--- out of someone and then has to say “never mind”?

And what does that say about character? Or management ability? Or steadiness under fire?

Politics may be a dirty business, but GOPers will find it’s hard to play the character card with a character whose hands are as unclean as Trump’s.

Tim Mullaney writes about politics and economics for MarketWatch.