Unfortunately, we do not live in an era in which rational thought tends to carry the day. Fox News immediately pushed out a one-paragraph, byline-free half-truth of story claiming that Nelson "admitted" that she had "forged part of [the] yearbook inscription" attributed to Moore. They quickly changed the headline from "forged" to "wrote," added a correction, and started deleting tweets, but by then, the message had already spread. Breitbart published an even more disingenuous distortion of her words, omitting the qualifier altogether. And it is this version of the story that is now prompting an army of overjoyed Pepe avatars to conclude that Nelson has finally been proven to be the liar they suspect her of being all along.

This is pretty embarrassing for Nelson's attorney, Gloria Allred, who should have spotted the distinctions right away, asked her client about them, and made this detail public in their very first press conference. The substance of what Nelson revealed—which is, again, that a Senate candidate sexually assaulted a teenager and wrote her lecherous season's greetings in the same year—never hinged on whether Moore had written those last two lines. There already exists plenty of evidence that the signature is his. The yearbook just served as more corroborating evidence of the relationship between one accuser and the candidate who responded by angrily denying that he even knew her. Clarifying from the beginning that Nelson had scribbled the addendum to commemorate a few logistical details would have made this into a non-issue.

But this story, like so many others right now, is about optics, not substance. Politically, the fact that Nelson didn't "admit" to "forging" anything here is less important than the breathless dissemination of headlines with words like "admits" and "forged" and "bombshell" appearing in all caps. If Roy Moore wins a Senate seat next week, it will be because he managed to sow just enough seeds of doubt among prospective supporters, convincing them that looking the other way and checking the box next to his name is a morally acceptable choice. Unforced errors like this one provide the right-wing propaganda machine, which already needs no encouragement to obfuscate the truth, with everything it needs to discredit a woman before an audience desperately hoping for her to be discredited.