We suppose in a better world, our elected representatives would always comport themselves with dignity and decorum, going about the people’s business with the seriousness that the Republic’s federal government deserves. Alas, as our Constitution’s author James Madison wrote in Federalist 10, “Enlightened statesmen will not always be at the helm.” Indeed, a good many of our 535 elected members of the House and Senate — not to mention our president — are not exactly enlightened statesmen.

On Wednesday, House Democrats censured a member for the first time since 2010, subjecting Representative Paul Gosar (R-AZ) to official rebuke and stripping him of all his committee assignments for a cartoon tweet. Granted, that now-removed anime cartoon was in poor taste — it reportedly featured him killing Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and swinging a sword at President Joe Biden. But if there’s anything that truly reveals the utter lack of seriousness among our elected representatives, it’s fighting over a cartoon.

The video “was not meant to depict any harm or violence against anyone portrayed in the anime,” Gosar claimed. “The video is truly a symbolic portrayal of a fight over immigration policy.” Moreover, he insisted that he’s in the same company as Alexander Hamilton, “the first person attempted to be censured by this House.” Make of that what you will.

Gosar behaved foolishly in posting a stupid video, and Republicans should have been quick to rebuke his poor choice. Just because Democrats routinely engage in sophomoric behavior doesn’t mean Republicans should.

That said, it’s hard to tell from Democrats what’s truly outrageous. They are a humorless lot who scream and cry over jokes and memes all the time, so when one actually does cross a line, they’ve been crying “wolf” for so long that no one believes them. This video deserved an eye roll and a rebuke, not censure and lectures about civility from those who don’t know how to practice it themselves.

Speaking of crying “wolf,” Ocasio-Cortez fantastically and falsely claimed to have nearly died during the Capitol riot. (That alone should have made Gosar think twice about making her a martyr again.) She is a charlatan whose primary mission in DC, aside from pushing socialism, is building her own brand as a melodramatic social media diva. Democrats hugging her on the House floor after the vote prove it. Memo to Republicans: Don’t help her.

The bigger point here is that Democrats are a bunch of shameless hypocrites. Ilhan Omar regularly spews hateful and anti-Semitic things. Democrats circled the wagons. Maxine Waters has on multiple occasions incited violence. Democrats ignore it. Eric Swalwell, a member of the Intelligence Committee, slept with a Chinese spy, spilling who knows what secrets. He remains on the Intel Committee. Democrats also shielded Pelosi herself from accountability over her own race-baiting against Donald Trump.

That’s barely scratching the surface of the history of a party that specializes in what the Clintons always called the politics of personal destruction. Democrats say mean and hateful things about Republicans all the time, casting them as the absolute worst of villains.

When it comes to Gosar, there is only one reason Democrats got up off the fainting couch to censure him, and their propagandists in The Washington Post tell us as much in the first sentence of their report: It’s “a move that comes amid growing worries about violent political rhetoric 10 months after a mob of former president Donald Trump’s supporters attacked the Capitol.”

Democrats want to spend the next year telling voters that Republicans are a “threat to democracy.” It might be all they’ve got to stave off or mitigate what most observers expect will be an electoral shellacking akin to 2010. Gosar deserves chastisement for making their narrative easier.

Speaker Nancy Pelosi lectured, “Disguising death threats against a member of Congress and a president of the United States in an animated video does not make those death threats any less real or less serious.”

Do you remember the last time real violence — actual attempted murder — was committed against members of Congress? It was when a Bernie Sanders fan shot at a bunch of Republicans practicing baseball, nearly killing Representative Steve Scalise. That wasn’t a cartoon.

As for where this petty tit-for-tat will lead, Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy condemned the Democrats’ “rules for thee, but not for me” approach. “What [Democrats] have started cannot be easily undone. Their actions today and in the past have forever changed the way the House operates,” he warned. He named several Democrats who, if they want to keep committee assignments in a future GOP-controlled House, “will need the approval of a majority.” He concluded: “The House is weaker, more partisan, and more self-focused today than when Speaker Pelosi became speaker less than four years ago. Future Congress will suffer for it.”

Then again, Americans have always been a rowdy lot, and, as the saying goes, perhaps we’re getting the government we deserve. From a higher vantage point, remember this: The real damage being done in Congress isn’t fighting over videos, tweets, and committee assignments. It’s foisting unconstitutional socialist totalitarianism on the nation, a few trillion dollars at a time.