Senator Jeff Flake, on whom the future of the US supreme court seems to hinge, agreed on 60 Minutes this week that if Brett Kavanaugh can be shown to have lied, his nomination is over.

The implication is that we need the FBI to interview people and gather information to know if he lied. Which, basically, made my head explode. The free press of the United States has fact-checked what he said in that hearing, and they have found swarms of instances in which he misled senators. And former roommates have even come out to accuse him outright of telling bald-faced lies. This is in addition to Kavanaugh’s refusal to answer senators’ questions directly and straightforwardly, and sometimes to answer them at all.

The Senate hearing has already utterly disqualified him to hold any office that requires probity and evenhandedness and even equanimity. His lies were constant, sometimes perplexingly pointless, often easily disprovable, and together this tapestry of mendacity shows him to be the very opposite of what a justice should be.

I take the allegations of sexual assault and harassment against him seriously, but there is a real danger that making his candidacy ride on whether or not he can be proved to have abused his female peers decades ago obscures the other pressing reasons why he is an outrageous candidate.

There are many, including raging partisanship, but let’s stick to lies.

Start with the drinking, about which so many of his peers have told stories that contradict his. Bloomberg News reports: “Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh has readily acknowledged that he often drank beer during his prep school days and made a point in his congressional testimony that seniors could buy beer legally in Maryland at the age of 18. But Kavanaugh was never a legal drinker in that state when he was a high schooler – he was still 17 when that state’s drinking age was increased to 21 on July 1, 1982.” He says of himself at that age: “Sometimes I had too many beers. Sometimes others did. I liked beer. I still like beer,” but we never learned what “too many beers” means to him.

Asked by Senator Coons whether he’d “ever gotten aggressive while drinking or forgotten an evening after drinking?” he answered and then undercut his answer: “basically no. I don’t know really what you mean by that, like, what – what are you talking about?”

After the hearing, Yale classmate Chad Ludington stated: “When Brett got drunk, he was often belligerent and aggressive. On one of the last occasions I purposely socialized with Brett, I witnessed him respond to a semi-hostile remark, not by defusing the situation, but by throwing his beer in the man’s face and starting a fight that ended with one of our mutual friends in jail.”

The New York Times dug up a police report on a 1985 drunken bar brawl the US supreme court nominee seems to have started, in which his friend reportedly injured a man and to which the police were called. Anyone who watched the performance last Thursday knows that Kavanaugh is belligerent and aggressive when he’s meant to be sober at 53.

Kavanaugh claims of Ford’s account: “All the witnesses who were there say it didn’t happen,” which is untrue: two of them say that though they don’t remember it, it may well have happened – what Nathan J Robinson at Current Affairs calls: “The difference between the absence of an awareness of an event and an awareness of the absence of an event.”

Yale roommate James Roche declares he was “a notably heavy drinker, even by the standards of the time, and that he became aggressive and belligerent when he was very drunk”. Another Yale friend, Liz Swisher, now chief of the gynecologic oncology division at the University of Washington School of Medicine describes him “slurring his words, stumbling … there’s no medical way I can say that he was blacked out ... But it’s not credible for him to say that he has had no memory lapses in the nights that he drank to excess.”

Senator Klobuchar asked: “So you’re saying there’s never been a case where you drank so much that you didn’t remember what happened the night before, or part of what happened.”

Kavanaugh replied belligerently and dodgily, though his statement could be taken as an admission. He said: “It’s – you’re asking about, you know, blackout. I don’t know. Have you?”

Klobuchar replied: “Could you answer the question, Judge? I just – so you – that’s not happened. Is that your answer?”

He again tried to evade her, rudely: “Yeah, and I’m curious if you have.”

He did the same with Senator Whitehorse, demanding to know what Whitehorse likes to drink after this astonishing exchange about the yearbook:

Whitehouse: So [was] the vomiting that you reference in the Ralph Club reference, related to the consumption of alcohol?

Kavanaugh: Senator, I was at the top of my class academically, busted my butt in school. Captain of the varsity basketball team. Got in Yale College. When I got into Yale College, got into Yale Law School. Worked my tail off.

Senator Booker asked: “You said you never had gaps in memories … Never had foggy recollection about what happened. Is that correct, sir, yes or no?” to which he replied, “That’s – that’s what I said.”

The possibility exists that Kavanaugh does not know he’s lying, because he does not know himself. I have often encountered men whose self-confidence is so great they don’t allow any of the self-doubt or self-scrutiny that can help let the light in on who they are and what they have done. People who have all their lives been told they are exceptional and amazing are not good at recognizing their flaws and mistakes, and they are rarely obliged to do so. When they are, they don’t handle it well.

There’s also the interesting business of what a blackout is: a period of severe intoxication in which the brain ceases to form memories. You don’t remember what you don’t remember. In a 2002 Pentagon briefing, then secretary of defense Donald Rumsfeld famously said: “Reports that say that something hasn’t happened are always interesting to me, because as we know, there are known knowns; there are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns – the ones we don’t know, we don’t know.” Perhaps when Kavanaugh faces himself, he faces a field of unknown unknowns.

Whatever the cause, what he said does not meet minimum standards of probity and honesty. Many have remarked that in any other job interview – and let us not forget this was a job interview, not a trial – he would have been written off as unqualified. In a functioning republic, we would have had a real FBI investigation, rather than the one Senator Jeff Merkley called “a sham. This stunted, strangled investigation was designed to provide cover, not to provide the truth”. It’s a lie to cover up lies.

But here’s what’s scary. If Senator Flake doesn’t already know Judge Kavanaugh is lying, then he’s lying to himself, too.