Turns out Jones was only pretending to be a madman

as The Joker in “Batman.” In other words, like the Oscar-winning actor, Jones is just pretending to be a madman.

You have to wonder how Edgar Welch feels about that. He’s the North Carolina man who shot up a pizzeria in Washington, D.C., last year because he believed a tale spread by Jones and others that it was the headquarters of a child molestation ring run by Hillary Clinton. He faces the possibility of many years in prison when he is sentenced in June.

You have to wonder how Leonard Pozner feels about it, too. He’s been getting death threats and has been challenged to prove that his son, Noah, ever existed, all because Jones and others claimed the 2012 shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School, in which Noah and 25 others were killed, was a hoax. He faces the rest of his life without his child.

Finally, you have to wonder how Donald Trump feels about it. The so-called president has professed admiration for Jones and has built his worldview, such as it is, around a Jones-like belief that a tangled skein of conspiracies explains virtually everything in life that refutes, frustrates or embarrasses him. We face four years of him steering the ship of state.

As regards the lawyer’s claim, there are two possible conclusions. One: he’s telling the truth and Jones never believed the garbage he vomited. Or two: Jones is trying to hoax the court.

Not that it matters which is true. Either way, Jones has hurt people and ruined lives. Either way, he has helped damage the country.

We now live in the United States of Confusion, a nation of alternative realities and alternative facts where reasoned and informed political debate is all but impossible because too many of us prize ideology above factuality.

Jones fills a need. Frightened people seek easy ways to comprehend the big, bad world. Alternative facts and realities are among the easiest.

And never mind the damage that is done, the ignorance that is fostered, the pain that is caused.

Meantime the rest of us — dare we still say, “most” of us? — muddle through actual reality using actual facts to confront the big, bad world. It is not easy.

But it sure beats the alternatives. PHOENIX — Three months ago, State Trooper Jonathan Otto, 33, of the Arizona Department of Public Safety, pulled over a car that had caught his attention by traveling 104 miles per hour long after midnight, just south of Kingman. He smelled marijuana in the car. It was driven by a man with an adult female wearing only lingerie. Their passenger was a female juvenile whose fake document showed her to be 18. She was, Otto says, “not wearing a whole lot of clothing.”

The adults had taken this 16-year-old from California to Arizona and were heading for Las Vegas. The girl gave Otto the California phone number of her