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So yesterday morning Jeffrey Lord of the American Spectator put up a long post claiming that Shirley Sherrod had lied when she said that a relative of hers was lynched in Georgia in 1943.

Specifically, Lord claimed that the term “lynching” refers exclusively to murder by hanging. Since Sherrod’s relative was merely arrested, handcuffed, publicly beaten for as much as half an hour by three police officers, dragged feet-first across a courthouse lawn, and then left to die, Lord said, he wasn’t lynched.

Informed that lynching does not refer, and has never referred, exclusively to hangings, Lord has tried a variety of new lines of attack in the last 36 hours. He’s argued that three assailants is too few for a lynch mob (it isn’t), that the Supreme Court refuted the claim that the crime was a lynching (they didn’t), and even — most recently — that because lynching wasn’t articulated as a specific criminal offense in the Jim Crow era, the term cannot be properly applied to any historical event.

Yeah. It’s a train wreck.

Lord’s comments on his and others’ posts on the American Spectator site have become increasingly erratic over the last two days, so I’m not going to even try to parse and refute them all. But his repeated references to a Supreme Court case that arose from the incident prompted me to take a look at the decision in question, and it turns out that it’s a fascinating and important one.

Grab a snack. This is going to take a while.

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