Brian Williams must have assumed he was being gracious. The Army command sergeant major he had befriended during the 2003 invasion of Iraq was retiring after 24 years of service. So on January 29, the anchor of NBC Nightly News invited Sergeant Major Tim Terpak to see the New York Rangers at Madison Square Garden with him. Their presence was announced via loudspeaker and greeted with applause. “How about that?” Williams said on his program the following day. “Standing ovation from the crowd of 18,000 people as players on both teams slapped their sticks on the ice as a show of respect.”

NBC aired a clip from the Rangers game in which the public address announcer introduced Terpak as the man “responsible for the safety of Brian Williams and his NBC News team after their Chinook helicopter was hit and crippled by enemy fire.” This assertion—which Williams has made repeatedly for years—was false. A source told the military newspaper Stars and Stripes to read a Facebook thread in which soldiers who had been in Iraq at the time challenged Williams’s account. On February 4, a few days after the Stars and Stripes article on Williams was published, NBC’s newsreader issued an on-air correction. “I want to apologize,” he said. “I said I was traveling in an aircraft that was hit by RPG fire. I was instead in a following aircraft.”

But Williams’s confession did not have its intended effect. The controversy remained very much alive, and at this writing his future at NBC is unclear. Stars & Stripes uncovered more than half a dozen instances when Williams lied about what had happened in Iraq and published allegations that even Williams’s apology was untrue. Other news outlets began looking into stories Williams had told about seeing dead bodies floating in the streets of New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina and flying over Katyusha rockets during the 2006 war between Israel and Hezbollah. Williams took a leave of absence as NBC began an internal investigation into his misstatements.

Media columnists—including this one!—wrote page after page of speculation about who might replace Williams in the anchor’s chair, just how strongly Tom Brokaw disliked him, the collapsing borders between entertainment and hard news, the nature of celebrity, the Rashomon problem of incomplete and false memories, and the continued inability of the mainstream media to live up to the standards of truth and objectivity that they so sanctimoniously lord over the rest of us.

The few defenses of Williams that have been written so far seem to me to be incomprehensibly lame: Joe Klein said Williams’s “apology was not elegant, but it should be accepted” because “our memories are not very reliable” and once in 1978 two Lebanese teenagers may have threatened Klein with rifles. (No, the logic is no clearer in the original.) Roger Simon of Politico compared Williams to the slain cartoonists of Charlie Hebdo in an I-think-he’s-trying-to-be-funny column that said “we should just chill” because “Every saint has a past, and every sinner has a future”—deep, man—before celebrating the contribution that the obnoxious anti-American and anti-Israel protesters of Code Pink make to American democracy. Bill Moyers published an article on his website making a bizarre case that no matter how many times Williams lied to a national audience that trusted him to state the facts plainly and directly, the true “shame of American journalism” was the war in Iraq to begin with, so, you know, put that in your pipe and smoke it.

The issue is not whether memory can be faulty, but whether news anchors have a responsibility to their audience and deserve heightened scrutiny for their misstatements, especially in cases when they have repeated falsehoods despite being asked and admonished to correct them. One would expect decorated columnists for Time and Politico to understand the nature of the different and higher standard to which we hold the press, since they spend not a small amount of their time celebrating and awarding themselves as keepers of a sacred trust. Former LBJ toady Bill Moyers, who gleefully retailed information from illicit FBI wiretaps of Martin Luther King Jr., we hold to a lesser standard.

And Williams? He stands out in a field loaded with gasbags and airheads and poseurs and know-it-alls and grandstanders and filibusterers and look-at-me-ma-no-hands narcissists. He is notorious for making long-winded digressions and asides as he introduces segments on innovations in catheter technologies, inclement weather, and minority students who make the world a better place. His page on the Internet Movie Database would inspire envy in the most established actor: 76 credits as “himself,” including multiple visits to The Tonight Show, The Late Show, The Daily Show, Late Night, Saturday Night Live (as host), Don Rickles: One Night Only, Live with Kelly and Michael, The Oprah Winfrey Show, Entertainment Tonight, Rachael Ray, Sesame Street, 30 Rock, and The Simpsons 20th Anniversary Special: In 3D! On Ice!

The journey from slow-jamming the news with Jimmy Fallon and Questlove to self-dramatization and deceit worthy of Don Quixote is not a very long one. And yet I also cannot help noticing that all the attention on the scope of his delusions and the social position of the newsreader in this Internet age misses the real story: The sheer baseness—the baseness—of his original Iraq lie.

Strip Brian Williams of his wealth and fame and influence (such as it is), and you have a man who for more than a decade falsely claimed to have been under enemy attack when it increasingly seems as though he were not in any danger at all. Such an act is not only dishonorable in itself; it also demeans the sacrifices made by soldiers and journalists who have lost their lives or suffered traumatic injury in America’s ongoing fight against terrorism in the Middle East.

Lying about war is no trifle. In 2013, President Obama signed a law making it a federal crime to wear medals you did not earn. The Stolen Valor Act replaced a 2005 law that had been struck down by the Supreme Court.

I looked up how Brian Williams covered the story: “Our own military analyst here at NBC News, Jack Jacobs, who happens to be a recipient of the Medal of Honor, said today that while only a pathetic creature would lie about such things, he sides with freedom of speech in this case.” Indeed, “pathetic creature” may not be a bad way to describe Brian Williams, the celebrity newsreader whose seemingly noble gesture of gratitude to an American soldier has inadvertently and irreversibly stained his own good name.