Not surprisingly to me at least, gay body-builder and meth dealer Michael Jones appears to have been lying about his sexual relationship with Colorado Springs paster Ted Haggard.

Also not surprisingly, the Rocky Mountain News is doing contortions to salvage Jone's credibility, eliciting as far as possible, claiming a lack of sleep as a mitigating factor.

Aurora polygraph examiner John Kresnik conducted the test for free. He is willing to do a second test, but he urged Jones to wait a couple of weeks until he can rest and the controversy dies down.

He said it's rare for a second test to differ from the first.

Kresnik acknowledged that conditions for the test were not ideal.

"I'd rather have done it when he was well-rested and well-fed," Kresnik said. But, he said that Jones was eager to take the test and was disappointed when his answers to two key questions showed deception. Jones took the test at Kresnik's office from about 5 a.m. to 6:30 a.m.

Kresnik first talked with Jones, then went over the questions he would ask. He then hooked Jones up to sensors to monitor his skin, breathing, heart rate and blood pressure. Kresnik said he has conducted thousands of similar tests in 25 years.

Nevertheless, buried at the bottom of the story is this evaluation by a former FBI polygrapher.

Another retired FBI agent, James Earle, of Colorado Springs, said in his experience, after conducting nearly 12,000 tests in the past 27 years, that results are usually quite accurate.

He said the examiner should have been able to tell that Jones was exhausted and adjust for that in the scoring.

"If they were really exhausted, it could be a factor. But, it's not going to invalidate the test," said Earle, who used to supervise polygraph tests for the FBI throughout the western U.S.

Earle has a doctorate and just finished a term as a vice president of the National Polygraph Association.

He also served as president of the Colorado chapter.

"Exhaustion will never affect breathing or the cardio response. It does seem to affect body temperature," Earle said.

While in the FBI, Earle conducted tests on a range of suspected criminals from informants to kidnappers, murderers and embezzlers.

He also had to take the tests himself every year.

He said the tests are much more advanced technologically than they used to be.

The sensors that attach to the body are much more sensitive.

Jones' revelations are generally considered to be politically motivated. I think its rather obvious that someone paid him, particularly since he's publicly admitted that he's a meth dealer with the likelyhood that he'll get prosecuted on that basis. Coloradans are facing a couple of competing voter initiatives referred to as Amendment 43 and Referendum I. The former basically defines marriage as between a man and a woman. The latter extends many if not all of the legal rights of marriage to homosexual unions without calling it marriage.

The irony here is that Ted Haggard has been generally considered a moderate on the issue of gay marriage.

It would be expedient to write Haggard off as just another religious hypocrite, but his public identity has been more nuanced than others'.

For example, he raised the ire of fellow evangelicals when he applauded a 2003 U.S. Supreme Court decision striking down a Texas anti-sodomy law.

"I believe the church has to teach against immorality, but I don't believe it's the role of the state to spend money to find out what consenting adults do in their bedrooms and then haul them off to jail," he told The Denver Post last year.

When Muslims expressed outrage in 2003 over the comments of religious conservative Franklin Graham, who disparaged Islam, Haggard urged fellow evangelicals to temper their speech. And it was Haggard who offered an apology on behalf of evangelicals when Christian broadcaster Pat Robertson called for the assassination of Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez.

Haggard was involved in writing Colorado's constitutional amendment on marriage, which would cement into the state constitution its definition as a union between one man and one woman. However, he resisted efforts that would have had the ballot measure ban domestic partnerships.

"We want to say marriage is something, and we also want to give the freedom for citizens or legislators if they want to give similar benefits to other people," he told The Post in January.

I tend to find a lot of irony lying around and this is no exception. In pursuit of an "October surprise" to push Referendum I over the top, whoever engineered this fiasco at best accomplished nothing and at worst may actually contribute to defeating the proposal and eliminating a moderate voice in the primary political opposition to gay marriage.

Its been demonstrated historically that extreme measures to discredit or silence opponents often have the opposite effects. The worry about political assassination is that it creates martyrs which actually strengthen whatever political movement you are trying to squelch. Similarly, manufacturing scandals of the type we see here often plays into the hands of your opponents, breaking internal political logjams.

Would we really want to see Ted Kennedy, Howard Dean or Nancy Pelosi gone? These characters constitute internal obstacles to badly-needed reform and weaken the Democrat party, so wise conservatives will of course be publicly outraged by their existence, but tacitly pleased to have them in positions of power.

While there may have been some hand-wringing over the scandals that saw Tom Delay and Bob Ney resign, the fact is that without the scandals there would have been no way to remove these powerful figures from the party leadership structure, and for the future of the party, they needed to be removed.

Every herd need culling to keep it strong, and conversely, to keep a herd weak--leave be the lame and sick.