A few days ago I had a very strange dream. In this dream, B.B. King had just died and the world was going about the necessary business of mourning his death. For those who don't know B.B. King from Martin Luther King, the blues giant is very much alive, but for purposes of my dream, he was dead.

In the dream, I was unusually sad about Mr. King's passing, though I'm not as big a fan of his work as I am of folks like Muddy Waters, Son House and Howlin' Wolf. Still, I found myself on the berm of some endless highway choking back tears over the loss of such an important musical ambassador.

Suddenly, I came across a guitar laid out on the dead grass of the berm. It didn't really look like "Lucille," B.B. King's famous electric guitar, but it had some kind of connection to the bluesman. I picked it up and immediately noticed its unusual neck, which was basically a long piece of hard black rubber. There were no tuning pegs or frets.

A television materialized. A news reader announced that an examination of B.B. King's effects turned up evidence that "Lucille" was a prop and that the musician never actually played a note. He was miming. I was shocked.

Then I woke up from that very strange dream wondering what prompted it.

I remembered that one of the last things I read the evening before I had that dream was Fox News host Glenn Beck's admission that a claim he made during the "Restoring Honor" rally at the Lincoln Memorial was a lie.

Mr. Beck gave a speech on the same date and place as the 47th anniversary of Martin Luther King's "I Have a Dream" speech, but he kept it non-political for the most part. Mr. Beck didn't call for racial or social justice like MLK had, preferring instead to give his followers the kind of patriotic kitsch that sounds vaguely religious to the biblically illiterate.

But along with the bromides, Mr. Beck included an incredible, pointless lie to impress the rubes about what he wanted them to believe was his literal grasp on history. "I have been going to Mount Vernon [George Washington's estate]," he said explaining some of his movements in the days and weeks leading up to the "Restoring Honor" rally.

"I went to the National Archives, and I held the first inaugural address written in his own hand by George Washington," Mr. Beck said, his voice quavering with emotion. If he was that choked up and on the verge of blubbering recalling the moment, it made a lot of folks wonder what Mr. Beck would have done if he had, indeed been allowed to personally handle such a precious document at the National Archives.

Were Glenn Beck's tears now a part of the historical record? Did spittle from his ecstatic sputtering spray and stain George Washington's first inaugural?

It seemed too preposterous a notion, but Mr. Beck assured his followers that he was telling the truth. After all, he was relating the story in the context of contrasting the first president's truthfulness with the current culture's untruthfulness and ungodliness. It would be idiotic for Mr. Beck to lie about something that significant knowing that his speech would be analyzed by friends and foes alike, right?

Mother Jones, the progressive investigative news magazine, was the first to bust Mr. Beck's claims that he personally handled George Washington's inaugural address. Stephanie Mencimer of Mother Jones interviewed those whose duty it is to protect and preserve the nation's founding documents. They insisted that touching any of them would be a violation of national policy. What Mr. Beck claimed simply didn't happen.

MSNBC's Keith Olbermann and Ed Schultz wasted no time in pointing out the absurdity of Mr. Beck's claim, but still, it took nearly a week for him to fess up. On his radio show, Mr. Beck acknowledged that there's a cumbersome protocol to examining the documents and that he didn't touch them as he had claimed at the rally. "I thought it was a little clumsy to explain [what really happened]," Mr. Beck said adding, "I thought it would be a little easier in the speech."

See, lying is no big deal if you're Glenn Beck and you're trying to tell a good, patriotic story.

Still, Mr. Beck told us to "expect a miracle" at an event he said would put the country on a path to reclaiming its soul. Perhaps the real miracle was that most people didn't notice that under all that piety at the national mall, Mr. Beck was peddling the same old lying politics.

Tony Norman's weekly video, the Last Word, is featured exclusively in the Insight section on PG+, a members-only web site from the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. Our introduction to PG+ gives you all the details.