His ethics are elastic and his lies abundant — about his actions in the second Bush administration, about his awareness of a mentor’s obsession with pornography and mistreatment of women. Or he’s a primly religious, utterly devoted family man whose blemishes are the inventions and exaggerations of political foes.

That’s a misleading, false dichotomy, inconsistent with everything we know about human nature and about ourselves.

I don’t believe that anyone persuasively accused of what Christine Blasey Ford says that Kavanaugh did to her has any business on the Supreme Court. So we must try our hardest to come to a best guess about what happened more than 35 years ago, including by listening closely to her scheduled testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee on Thursday.

But that effort isn’t served by the caricatures that have come to dominate this discussion, as they do so many others. Those caricatures are out of sync with life. And no set of character witnesses — to Kavanaugh’s virtues or vices — is the final, irrefutable word. They caught a few scenes of him. They didn’t see the whole messy movie.

We show different colors at different times in different situations. We age, sometimes in ways that make us better, sometimes in ways that make us worse. We fashion ourselves, with or without cunning, into who and what we need to be for friends, lovers, parents, children, bosses and employees based on their diverse expectations and ever-shifting demands.

We are genuinely saints and we are genuinely sinners. We are pieces that add up to an incoherent whole.

In the interview that Kavanaugh and his wife gave to Fox News on Monday, he repeatedly mentioned the Sept. 14 letter that 65 women who knew him during high school signed and sent to the leaders of the Senate Judiciary Committee. It vouched for positive interactions with and impressions of him.