How do you know that you’ve won the argument? It’s usually when your opponent expands the scope of the issues well beyond their deliberately narrow parameters in the pursuit of more favorable terrain. Connecticut’s Gov. Dannel Malloy is desperately searching for higher ground.

On Monday, Malloy humiliated himself and his state when he imposed a ban on state-sponsored travel to Indiana in protest of that state’s Religious Freedom and Restoration Act. Unable to respond to the fact that his state also has a RFRA that is even more protective of the sensibilities of religious adherents, Malloy has taken to making even more embarrassingly overwrought comments about Indiana’s law and its repercussions.

“He got caught,” super-sleuth Malloy told CNN’s Carol Costello on Tuesday, congratulating himself for having noticed a law passed by Indiana’s legislature and signed by the state’s governor. How could these Hoosiers have been so careless?

He went on to strongly criticize Mike Pence’s judgment and political sensibilities, calling his appearance on ABC’s This Week with George Stephanopoulos “disastrous.” Malloy concluded by noting that any of the 2016 Republican candidates have been effectively disqualified from holding higher office (via Mediaite):

“You can’t have it both ways,” Malloy said. “Either you are for discrimination or against it. The law was specifically written to allow companies and individuals to exclude services being provided to individuals based on sexual orientation. There is no gray area here…You can’t defend it. If [the Indiana legislature] doesn’t solve the problem companies and associations need to move out of the state.”

In response to GOP presidential hopefuls who have supported the law, Malloy said, “None of the people who would defend this law in Indiana — the debate that took place about the law, its passage, the ceremony — none of the people who would defend it are qualified to be President of the United States.”

For a politician with the audacity to criticize another governor’s political acumen, Malloy is choosing an odd course of action in making a pronouncement that will be immediately ignored and/or mocked by those he is supposedly castigating.

Malloy’s dismissible comments would barely be noteworthy save for the fact that they were made on the same day that it was confirmed Hillary Clinton deliberately and intentionally misled the American public when she insisted that she used a private email address exclusively out of a desire to preserve the “convenience” of only using one mobile device.

Clinton’s insistence that the expediency of using one device led her to eschew using a .gov email address was betrayed when she destroyed the majority of her emails following a congressional subpoena, but the revelation that she used two mobile devices as secretary of state confirms that she was being intentionally duplicitous at her United Nations press conference.

If anything disqualifies anyone for the presidency, it is lying to the American people and evading congressional oversight. For Gov. Malloy, however, his childlike excitability over perfectly banal RFRA law in Indiana is also evidence of the depth of the trouble in which Clinton finds herself. The press might be eager to change the subject, and the left’s disproportionate, garment-rending sanctimony over Indiana’s RFRA law provides a convenient distraction for now. But this invented controversy will soon fade. Clinton’s myriad ethical lapses and misleading statements, however, will not.