Jerry Falwell Jr.'s career, both at Liberty University and as a figurehead of the evangelical community, is over.

After years of mounting stunts and scandals, Falwell's personal life exploded into the national limelight. At first, he tried to get ahead of the story, with the Washington Examiner's Paul Bedard breaking his eleventh-hour statement claiming that his wife Becki had engaged in "an inappropriate personal relationship with" a pool assistant they had met nearly a decade ago, "something in which I was not involved." Then, however, came the real allegation — that one of the most sanctimonious moral scolds in the nation had recruited a 20-year-old pool boy to have sex with Becki while Falwell watched. Some people are just into that.

If you took this pitch to a porn director, he would shun it as too trite even for the internet's lowest form of entertainment. And it's true. Everyone calling Falwell a hypocritical hoaxer is also right. But the true tragedy of this scenario isn't just the collateral damage among Liberty's truly faithful, besmirched by Falwell's failures. It's the simple fact that Falwell should have been out before reports of his cuckolding and "throuple" were made public.

As a tax-exempt institution, Liberty is legally forbidden from making formal political endorsements, something Falwell jeopardized when he decided to sell out Ted Cruz, a faithful and practicing evangelical who would have materially advanced religious liberty as president, to back the thrice-married adulterer who now occupies the Oval Office. And now, there is the question of why precisely Falwell pulled the trigger for President Trump. Over at the American Conservative, Rod Dreher has an idea: