Republican congressman-elect George Santos is finding out the hard way that if you lie, it catches up with you. And if you lie about your entire life, Republicans will elevate you to a seat in Congress. Santos will be sworn in on Tuesday despite a mountain of information that's come up about his fabricated history.

The New York Times published another revealing article about Santos, and it's fascinating. He's been a liar for his entire life.

By 2008, court records show, Mr. Santos and his mother were living in Brazil, just outside Rio de Janeiro in the city of Niterói. Just a month before his 20th birthday, Mr. Santos entered a small clothing store and spent nearly $700 in 2008 dollars using a stolen checkbook and a false name, court records show.
Mr. Santos has denied that he committed crimes in the United States or abroad. But the Brazilian record shows that he admitted the fraud to both the police and the shopkeeper.

"I know I screwed up, but I want to pay," he wrote in a message to the store's owner on Orkut, a popular social media website in Brazil, in August 2009. "It was always my intention to pay, but I messed up."

In November 2010, Mr. Santos and his mother appeared before the police, where they both admitted that he was responsible. On Sept. 13, 2011, a Brazilian judge ordered Mr. Santos to respond to the case. Three months later, a court official tried to subpoena him, but he could not be found.

For a while, Santos lived with Pedro Vilarva, the latter of which explained their relationship and how it unraveled because of all of the lies George fed him.

"He used to say he would get money from Citigroup, he was an investor," Vilarva recalled. "One day it's one thing, one day it's another thing. He never ever actually went to work," he said.

Things began to unravel between the two men in early 2015, Mr. Vilarva said, after Mr. Santos surprised him with tickets to Hawaii that turned out not to exist. Around the same time, he said he discovered that his cellphone was missing, and believed Mr. Santos had pawned it.

The betrayal prompted him to plug Mr. Santos's name into a search engine, where he found that Mr. Santos was wanted by Brazilian police.

"I woke up in the morning, and I packed my stuff all in trash bags, and I called my father and I left," he said.

Vilarva was smart to get out the minute he found out who George really was: a liar. Republicans are doing the opposite. They're embracing the liar.