If, as La Rochefoucauld said, “Hypocrisy is the tribute that vice pays to virtue,” then what are we to make of those who lie about that tribute?

Perhaps we should ask Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer. After all, she just got caught saying one thing and doing another, and then lying through her teeth about having even done that other thing at all.

It seems sort of pathological.

Whitmer was outed Monday by a local news source, MIRS, for having traveled to Florida at a time when she’d been warning her fellow Michiganders about spring break trips, particularly to Florida, amid a surge in coronavirus cases.

As the Detroit Free Press reported that same day, Whitmer spokesperson Tiffany Brown “would not say when the trip occurred, except that it was more than a month ago and within the last six months and during a time that Michigan’s coronavirus positivity rate was in the low single digits. She would not say where Whitmer went or whether Whitmer traveled alone or with others.”

Credit here to the governor and her flack. Other than the who, what, where, why, and when of the story, their transparency is commendable.

Having been caught red-handed, then, some additional details began to dribble out. She went to Florida. To visit her dad. Who has a chronic health condition.

But then we found out she’d been asked point-blank about any trips she’d taken. As Fox News reports, “Last week, Whitmer joined the Michigan publication MIRS on their podcast, where she was asked by reporter Kyle Melinn if she was able to take any days off for spring break or over the past year amid the COVID-19 pandemic. Whitmer, a Democrat, responded that she was ‘here in town the whole time’ during spring break and that the last trip she had taken ‘was to Israel’ on official business.”

In Whitmer’s defense, “here in town the whole time” can be interpreted in multiple ways. It could mean that she was there in Michigan the whole time, or that she was there in Michigan the whole time, or that she was there in Michigan the whole time. Plenty of wiggle room in that statement.

So she secretly left the state after she’d warned everyone else not to. Then she got caught lying about it. What’s not to love about this gal?

It’s not the crime that gets ya, Gretch. It’s the cover-up.

Recall that last May, Whitmer warned Michigan’s locked-down residents not to travel to northern Michigan during Memorial Day weekend. “Don’t descend on [the northern Michigan resort town of] Traverse City from all regions of the state,” she said, right before her husband got caught trying to pull rank and get the family boat undocked for a Memorial Day trip to their property just outside of — you guessed it — Traverse City. But we digress.

Sadly, in Michigan, the lockdown hypocrisy isn’t limited to Whitmer. It’s reached, er, pandemic proportions within her administration. As the Detroit Free Press continues, “Officials earlier confirmed that Whitmer’s chief executive officer, Tricia Foster, traveled to Florida with her daughter during spring break, at a time Whitmer had specifically expressed concern about spring break travel to that state. Elizabeth Hertel, the director of the Department of Health and Human Services, the agency that issues Michigan’s coronavirus restrictions, recently traveled with her family to the Gulf Coast of Alabama when her department was cautioning against such travel and while cases in Michigan were surging.”

In related news, long-suffering Michiganders may have a viable option for removing Big Gretch from the governor’s mansion in November 2022. As the Detroit News reports, “Ronna McDaniel, chairwoman of the Republican National Committee, revealed this week that she’s considered running against Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer in the 2022 election. … McDaniel, the former chairwoman of the Michigan Republican Party, made the remark during ‘a closed-door meeting on Wednesday with RNC members in Dallas.’”

Run, Ronna, run. A fed-up state turns its lonely eyes to you.