Der Speigel has fired star journalist Claas Relotius, announcing that he fabricated nearly everything he wrote during his seven years with the influential news magazine.

But the real scandal here isn’t that the four-time winner of the German Reporter Prize is a serial fabulist. It’s that his lies in so many cases were so obvious that only confirmation bias can explain how they went unnoticed by the supposedly top-notch fact-checking team at one of Europe’s largest and most prestigious publications.

Put more simply, Relotius, whose body of work focused almost exclusively on life in the United States, flourished at Der Spiegel not because he was a master weasel, but because the editorial staff wanted to believe the dark and unflattering portraits he painted of America. That much seems obvious. The only people who don’t seem to realize that yet are the editors of Der Spiegel.

In a long-winded article published on Dec. 20, the magazine apologized to its readers and anyone else affected by Relotius’ litany of lies.

“He made use of images, Facebook posts, YouTube videos, and he borrowed material from old newspapers and obscure blogs. He assembled all the pieces and splinters and crumbs to create his characters. ... they were not human beings made flesh and blood,” the article reads, listing a number of the falsehoods the magazine has uncovered since first learning of the reporter's duplicity. “They are live on paper and their creator is Claas Relotius. Sometimes he made them sing, sometimes he made them cry and sometimes he had them pray."

It added, "And if he felt like it, as in ‘Jaeger's Border,’ he had his main character shoot into the night with an assault rifle. Because it made such a wonderful ending to his work of fiction.”

The apology article comes after Relotius himself confessed to weaving total falsehoods into at least 14 stories, including his award-winning profiles on the darker side of American life. The disgraced journalist, whose unflattering "coverage" of American politics and culture won him a laundry list of prestigious journalism awards, including CNN’s 2014 "Journalist of the Year" award, assured his editors that he didn’t lie in everything he wrote for the magazine. Sure, but ... fool me once, and all that.

There’s a lot of “How could this have happened?” handwringing in Der Spiegel’s apology article. It goes to lengths to explain the institutional blind spots that allowed Relotius to get away with it for so long. Absent from the article, however, is any sort of self-reflection on how the magazine’s own political and cultural biases make Relotius’ fabrications possible. At no point does the magazine experience a moment of self-awareness where it realizes it fell for the “too good to check” trap.

Consider, for example, this blog post written by two residents of a Trump-supporting Minnesota town Relotius supposedly profiled for an August 2017 report titled, “ Where they pray for Trump on Sundays.” The Minnesotans, Michele Anderson and Jake Krohn, list 11 major fabrications in the article. Some of them are small, but most of them are major. More damning for Der Spiegel is that most of the falsehoods could’ve been detected easily with a quick phone call or even a simple Google search. But Relotius' editors didn’t bother with any of those traditional forms of fact-checking. For them, the story of an outwardly racist, backwoods, dead-end town stocked with Trump-supporting yokels was too good to check.

When a story seems too good to be true, that’s because it probably is. Der Spiegel is paying the price for its editors' lack of healthy skepticism. It will continue to pay that price for a long time to come.