There is something almost too perfect about Donald Trump’s Reflecting Pool fiasco.

The pool was supposed to become a patriotic showpiece for America’s 250th birthday—clear water, handsome blue bottom, suitable for photographs, speeches, flags, and perhaps a tasteful amount of presidential self-congratulation.

Instead, the renovation reportedly produced peeling material, algae, and the general appearance of a municipal swimming pool whose maintenance director left town two months ago.

Ordinarily, when a renovation goes bad, government officials investigate the contractor.

Donald Trump investigated reality.

Reality was immediately identified as hostile.

According to Trump, vandals armed with cutting tools had attacked the Reflecting Pool liner, carving an enormous slash through it. Apparently, Washington now has roving gangs of radicalized pool-liner assassins who wander the National Mall at night carrying box cutters and a passionate hatred of reflecting pools.

And then things stopped being funny.

Federal prosecutors charged 67-year-old former Olympian David Hearn with felony vandalism. U.S. Attorney Jeanine Pirro declared that Hearn had engaged in a “violent effort” to damage the pool.

A violent effort.

Against a liner.

One imagines the courtroom sketches: Hearn glaring menacingly at a sheet of synthetic material while federal agents secure the perimeter around the shallow end.

Then came the awkward part.

A month later, Pirro’s office asked to dismiss the case. Prosecutors acknowledged that the pool’s problems were likely associated with hurried, defective contractor work rather than the vandalism theory that had launched the prosecution.

Suddenly the story was no longer merely about Donald Trump inventing another explanation for something that had gone wrong.

We have seen that movie.

Crowd too small? Biggest crowd ever.

Election lost? Stolen.

Renovation botched? Saboteurs!

Trump possesses the remarkable ability to convert personal disappointment into an organized conspiracy before most people have finished asking what really happened.

But a president telling a ridiculous story is one thing.

The federal government placing an American citizen under felony indictment because that story happens to be politically convenient is something else entirely.

That is where Jeanine Pirro enters this little morality play wearing the expression of someone who has just discovered that loyalty to Donald Trump does not come with a return policy.

Pirro now says her office initially received incomplete information from the Interior Department.

Really!?

But the broader problems with the Reflecting Pool renovation were hardly hidden in a classified bunker beneath the Pentagon. News organizations had been reporting them. The deterioration was visible. Questions about the workmanship were already public.

Yet somehow the machinery of federal prosecution got moving before somebody apparently asked the extraordinarily sophisticated investigative question:

Could the renovation simply have been done poorly?

That question arrived rather late for David Hearn.

An indictment is not a sternly worded parking ticket. It brings lawyers, expense, publicity, anxiety and the possibility of imprisonment. “Never mind” does not magically return the accused to the morning before the government announced he was a felon.

And that is why the Reflecting Pool story matters.

The dangerous part of Trump’s relationship with truth has never been merely that he says things that are demonstrably false and even absurd.

The dangerous part begins when powerful people decide that their job is not to determine whether Trump’s story is true.

Their job is to make the government behave as though it were true.

Pirro ultimately abandoned the prosecution.

Trump reportedly responded by declaring that she had made a mistake.

Of course.

In Trump world, correcting the mistake is the mistake.

And so, Washington’s Reflecting Pool has finally accomplished something magnificent.

It reflects perfectly.