Roy Moore

In this Nov. 30, 2017 file photo, former Alabama Chief Justice and U.S. Senate candidate Roy Moore speaks at a campaign rally, in Dora, Ala. In the Alabama Senate race, national Democrats and the liberal grassroots are treading lightly, trying not to sink Doug Jones' upset bid against Republican Roy Moore. (AP Photo/Brynn Anderson, File)

(Brynn Anderson)

Roy Moore's attempt at the United States Senate wasn't so much a campaign as it was a parallel pocket universe of political disbelief he spoke into existence -- a bubble in which sense, facts, decency and reality had no weight.

In Roy Moore's universe, Sharia law was a threat to America, already supplanting the Constitution in Illinois or Indiana or ... you know, somewhere up there. He'd read about it in an article on the Internet somewhere, or something.

In Roy Moore's universe, it was against the law for NFL players to kneel during the national anthem, and the First Amendment's protections didn't apply to Muslims in Congress or Hollywood Buddhists.

In Roy Moore's universe, the terror attacks of 911 and school shootings in Columbine and Newtown were God's punishment for tolerating the homosexuals.

In Roy Moore's universe, all those women who had come forward to accuse him of sexual assault or trawling the mall for them when he was 30 and they were teenagers -- all that was the product of a far-reaching conspiracy, a cabal that included the Democratic Party, the Republican Party, the media, Muslims, lesbians, gays, "transgisters," Richard Shelby, George Soros and Mitch McConnell.

These things he believed to be true for no apparent reason other than he said them aloud.

So he said it, so let it be believed.

And many Alabamians believed him, but not enough.

World-building isn't something to be dabbled in by lesser gods, and the gravitational pull of all that BS is now collapsing into a singularity of infinite mass and zero truth.

When the unofficial tallies on election night put Moore about 22,000 votes behind Doug Jones, Moore told his supporters that it wasn't over.

Military votes were still out, the campaign said.

Indeed, the state has an extended deadline for those absentee ballots -- all 366 of them. If all of them went to Moore, he'd still need 22,000 more votes.

But the provisional ballots had not been counted, the Moore campaign said.

This week the Alabama Secretary of State's Office said that there were 4,967 provisional ballots, but only 2,888 of them had been verified as legal votes. Again, the overwhelming majority of those would have to break toward Moore.

But the write-ins had not been counted, Moore's campaign argued.

It's worth taking a moment to understand how far-fetched, how delusional it would be for those write-in votes to make a difference here.

For Moore delusional fever dream to come true, nearly every write-in voter would have to have gone to the polls, looked at Roy Moore's name on the ballot, but rather than filling in the bubble that name, they'd have to go to the bottom of the ballot, write his name out correctly and then fill in the bubble by that blank.

And that would have to happen more than twenty thousand times.

Let's look at what's happening in the universe the rest of us live in.

In Morgan County, which tallied its write-ins quickly and conveniently posted them for us on the internet, there were 671 write in votes. About a third of those went to Luther Strange. Bozo the Clown received two votes and Buddy the Elf had one.

None there went to Moore.

Moore could end all of this. But he won't.

Instead, on Monday he sent out a fundraising email to supporters, asking them to donate $75,000 to his "Election Integrity Fund." That email told his remaining believers that "Reports of potential voter fraud and various other irregularities are streaming in from all across the state."

According to that email, the campaign had already raised more than $48,000 toward its goal.

In its final moments, the universe Roy Moore conjured into existence again showed its reason for being -- money -- just before, with the final tally, that fantasyland swallowed itself and disappeared into the void.

Kyle Whitmire is the state political columnist for the Alabama Media Group. You can follow his work on Facebook through Reckon by AL.com.