The Democratic National Convention might have its own Ted Cruz moment on live television Monday – and it threatens to rip the Democratic Party to pieces right as Hillary Clinton was about to take total control.

Hacked emails have exposed the ugly truth about the party’s primaries, confirming that the system was rigged against Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders from Day One.

These messages show how the party establishment betrayed their own voters by trying to deliver Clinton the nomination on a silver platter.

The revelations are so damning that they’re threatening to break the uneasy truce between Sanders and Clinton – and while he so far has indicated he still supports her, it’s clear he’s seething.

Will that lead to a shocking moment when he speaks in Philadelphia tonight? If so, Sanders would divide the 188-year-old party into two bickering camps heading into November.

It’s not a far-fetched possibility. Already, heads are rolling over the leaks, with DNC chair and shameless Clinton cheerleader Debbie Wasserman Schultz resigning as longtime Democrats cheer her demise.

“She’s essentially a pariah in every corner of the party,” a veteran Democratic strategist told NBC News. “This has needed to happen for a long time.”

Sanders and his supporters would certainly agree. He’s been calling on her to quit all along because his supporters knew the truth long before the hacked emails were released by WikiLeaks.

“The emails just proved what we believed to begin with,” Sanders supporter Dora Bouboulis, who was marching with thousands of others in protest on Sunday outside the convention hall in Philadelphia, told AFP.

Bouboulis and other Sanders supporters are livid over the emails, which indicates party officials worked relentless behind the scenes to undermine Sanders.

And they seemed to use the ugly politics of division they claim to eschew.

Before the critical primaries in Kentucky and West Virginia, the committee’s CFO, Brad Marshall, sent out a shady directive suggesting that operatives could question Sanders’ faith.

He wrote:

It might may no difference, but for KY and WVA can we get someone to ask his belief. Does he believe in a God. He had skated on saying he has a Jewish heritage. I think I read he is an atheist. This could make several points difference with my peeps. My Southern Baptist peeps would draw a big difference between a Jew and an atheist.

The party’s CEO, Amy Dacey, wrote back: “AMEN.”

Similarly, after it was revealed that lax security at the DNC allowed a Sanders operative to gain access to Clinton’s voter list, party apparatchik plotted how to manipulate coverage to make Sanders look bad.

“Wondering if there’s a good Bernie narrative for a story, which is that Bernie never had his act together, that his campaign was a mess,” Mark Paustenbach deputy to DNC spokesman Luis Miranda, wrote in an email.

It’s not clear if these strategies were ever followed up on – but the fact that they were even discussed behind the scenes reveals that Sanders was right all along.

The system was rigged from the beginning, and it was rigged against Sanders and his millions of enthusiastic supporters.

“It is an outrage,” Sanders said on CNN on Sunday “It’s sad that you would have people in important positions in the DNC trying to undermine my campaign.”

Outside the convention, thousands of Sanders backers took to the streets to call for Clinton’s ouster, chanting, “Hell, no, DNC, we won’t vote for Hillary.”

Online, Sanders supporters are using the phrase “Bernie Must Disavow” to call on their candidate to take back his endorsement – which would make for a dramatic moment when he speaks tonight at the Democratic National Convention in Philadelphia.

But even if he doesn’t… even if he continues to endorse the very party that worked relentlessly to undermine him, no one will buy it.

It’ll have all the credibility of a hostage video – and that lack of credibility may undo Clinton’s control of the party.

— The Horn editorial team