Mark Block, Herman Cain’s chief of staff and a complete idiot, went on Hannity last night to finally put this “multiple credible accusations of sexual harassment” issue to bed, so to speak. He came prepared with a stunning revelation:

BLOCK: Karen Kraushaar had come out as one of the women. And we’ve come to find out her son works at Politico, the organization that originally put the story out.

HANNITY: Have you confirmed that? I’ve been hearing that all day, rumors about that. You’ve confirmed that.

BLOCK: We’ve confirmed it that he does indeed work at Politico, and that’s his mother, yes.

See? It’s all a liberal media conspiracy, because the son of one of the five women to have accused Herman Cain of inappropriate behavior works in some sort of capacity at the news organization that originally ran the story reporting that Cain had been accused of sexual harassment (a story that was proven completely true shortly following its publication, meaning that even if it had been a plot, it was still a plot based on complete factual accuracy).

The only problem, of course, is that Josh Kraushaar, the reporter Block is referring to, no longer works at Politico, and hasn’t since 2010. Oh, there is also one other problem: Kraushaar is not Karen Kraushaar’s son. They are not related at all.

Mark Block is so good at managing campaigns, right, Dave Weigel?

This would be funny if it happened once, but we’re talking about Mark Block, who said just six days ago that Rick Perry’s campaign leaked the story, and never backed that up. We’re talking about a guy so inept at managing a campaign that he has an independent counsel looking at whether he broke campaign finance law.

I’m afraid I have to disagree with Weigel here: This is funny no matter how many times it happens.

The Cain campaign finally acknowledged this morning that this fact that they “confirmed” was not a fact at all, but, you know, mistakes happen, right?

Cain spokesman J.D. Gordon acknowledged Block’s mistake in an email to CNN.

“Based upon information available at the time of Mr. Block’s Tuesday night interview on Fox News, the campaign was led to believe that Mr. Josh Kraushaar, currently with the National Journal and a former employee of Politico, was the son of Karen Kraushaar,” Gordon said. “Mr. Josh Kraushaar is in fact, not related to Ms. Karen Kraushaar.”

The “information available at the time” was the same information “available” right now.

The Weekly Standard weighs in: “This is a sub-bush league gaffe.”

Plenty of savvy conservatives are slightly alarmed by the fact that the rubes are taking Cain’s joke of a campaign a bit too seriously, and this certainly won’t help. If your attempt to shift blame to the liberal media fails this spectacularly among people for whom pushing the liberal media bias claim is second nature, you are in trouble.

If Cain is serious about his campaign — or even if he just wants to maybe win Iowa and then flame out and score a well-paid punditry gig — he should probably fire Mr. Block. (He should also stop serially harassing women but that’s another story.)

Politicians are often left in the difficult position of delivering statements that fit their political narrative of choice, whether or not they conform to the realities at hand. And it can take a certain amount of cojones (to use the Spanish word) to make it through such moments. “But there’s a fine line,” as Jon Stewart pointed out on “The Daily Show” last night, “between courage and audacity, and several public figures have recently crossed it.”

When Jon Stewart watched Herman Cain announce on Saturday that he would suspend his campaign, the comedian didn’t see what many of the rest of us saw — a bizarre, overlong, bewildering spectacle, replete with the sort of insane antics and half-baked rhetorical devices (read: a reference to the “Pokemon” movie) that have confounded expectations and frustrated Cain’s detractors time and again these past several months. No. Instead, the Comedy Central host saw the closing of a comic gold mine. Fittingly, he said goodbye to the Cain campaign with something more than a hint of sadness.

The velocity of political sex scandals these days is such that you can barely register the principals as they parade on and off the television set. It’s a weird form of mercy. But even if there’s no reason to pretend that Herman Cain matters anymore, it’s worth stopping for a moment and pondering the peculiar story of Ginger White — and what it tells us about transactional sex in our age.

It’s fitting that the most revelatory interview with White comes via Leslie Bennetts, who happens to be known both for getting celebrities to let their guard down (while at Vanity Fair) and for her exhortations for women not to leave the workforce (in her book “The Feminine Mistake”). And no, the major nugget isn’t that White says she thought about groceries while having sex with Cain. (Cain denies that the two had a sexual relationship.) It’s how lack of money made White feel powerless, and sex (which, yes, she didn’t much enjoy) proved the next best commodity. That made her miserable .

As the sun rose Monday morning, it appeared as if the worst might have been behind the Herman Cain campaign. There had been no new allegations of sexual impropriety in weeks, and the candidate’s polling numbers, while waning, were not yet toxic. Then appeared Ginger White, the woman who claims to have carried on a 13-year affair with Cain, one that continued until relatively recently. Cain, for his part, acknowledges a personal relationship with White, but insisted in an interview with Wolf Blitzer that it was purely platonic.

Arizona state Sen. Lori Klein is Herman Cain’s Arizona state chairman and also the sinking candidate’s single best asset. If I were him, I’d immediately start booking Klein on cable TV as a campaign surrogate, because her impressive spin work is right now being sadly wasted.

Lori Klein, an Arizona state Senator and Cain’s Arizona state chairman, told CBS News she stands by Cain.

Says she has known him for 12 years and he’s “never been anything but a gentlemen – and I am not an unattractive woman.”