[Updated]

“Don’t even bother asking me all these other questions that you all are curious about, O.K.? Don’t even bother,” Herman Cain said, as he met a crowd of reporters. He was surrounded by men in white coats—doctors, apparently, rather than chorus members for a reprise of “Imagine There’s No Pizza.” What questions should reporters ask, if not the ones they are curious about? Even when they ask Cain what might be considered a boring question, like about China policy or what you get when you add three nines, his answers veer toward absurdism. And the event with the doctors was just one of the public appearances he had Wednesday. In another, he talked about “factions that are trying to destroy me.” Why would Cain make himself so visible, so awkwardly, on a day with one revelation after another about the sexual harassment allegations that have been following him (and which he denies)? One might as well ask why Cain is running for President at all: the answer won’t make any more sense.

It’s been a few days since Politico reported that two women who worked for Cain at the National Restaurant Association, an industry lobbying group, had alleged that he’d acted in a sexually inappropriate way, and that they had been paid to go away. Late Tuesday, the Times reported that the payment for one was a year’s salary—thirty-five thousand dollars. By Wednesday afternoon, the A.P. had found a third woman at the Association with a Cain story; meanwhile, Cain’s own campaign manager, Mark Block, also known as the man with the cigarette, pointed reporters to a radio receptionist in Iowa. The working day ended with Chris Wilson, a Republican consultant who now has some connection to the Perry campaign, but who once also worked for the National Restaurant Association—which seems to have been quite a place—saying that he had witnessed Cain behaving badly toward a woman at, where else, a restaurant: “So many people were aware of her situation, the fact she left—everybody knew with the campaign that this would eventually come up.” (Wilson added, in an e-mail, “I had nothing to do with leaking this in any way, and I’ve never discussed or shared this story with any of my clients—period.”)

This is a serious story because sexual harassment is a serious issue and Cain, somehow, is the Republican now leading the polls. And yet there was something depressing about its newsworthiness: How did we get to a point where the future of the Republic may depend on the inner workings of the National Restaurant Association? Is it wrong to wish that, in a serious political story with comments attributed to unnamed “senior association officials,” the association in question might have to do with national security or education or anything but fast food? The Times talked to four sources about one alleged encounter, which involved “heavy drinking—a hallmark they said, of outings with an organization that represents the hospitality industry.” It is a mark of where the G.O.P. is that one could imagine that sentence in a story about Rick Perry’s speech in New Hampshire this weekend, in which he began giggling when repeating the line “Live Free or Die.” (The speech organizer says that Perry wasn’t drunk, which almost makes it worse.)

Ryan Lizza has identified Cain as a new phenomenon: the Fringe Frontrunner. And there are fringes to the fringe. The N.F.L. does a better job of vetting its quarterbacks than the Republican Party does its candidates.

After much meandering, Cain said that the accusations were false, and that one of the women had reacted bizarrely to a friendly comment about her height. (“She thought that was too close for comfort.”) But the lawyer for one of the women said that she was thinking of coming forward, if she could be released from a confidentiality agreement she signed; as it turns out, she’s an actual person, not a rhetorical device or a numerologically based tax plan. If her story is compelling, Cain won’t be able to just talk about apples and oranges, and act like that’s answer enough.

Who benefits from all this? Maybe Perry, whose campaign Cain accused of leaking the story; or Mitt Romney, the Perry campaign’s suspect; maybe the Democrats (definitely Jon Stewart: see below). But it’s just not good for our country’s political culture, which looks ever more degraded. One doubts it’s even good for our pizza industry, and we used to be proud of that.

The Daily Show with Jon Stewart