Joe McCarthy was famously undone by the rhetorical questions at a 1954 congressional hearing: “Have you no sense of decency, sir, at long last? Have you left no sense of decency?”

If the same queries were directed to Candace Owens at such a forum, she’d sail on unperturbed — since she has no idea what “decency” means.

The conspiratorial podcaster has embarked on an investigative series on Erika Kirk, the widow of Charlie Kirk. In this context, “investigative series” means a loosely stitched together collection of sewerish falsehoods and innuendo.

Perhaps Owens can follow up with a franchise devoted to sullying the reputations of the widows of assassinated husbands throughout U.S. history. Are we sure that Mary Todd Lincoln was as innocent as she seemed? Didn’t Jackie Kennedy act kind of weird in Dallas? What did Ida Saxton McKinley know?

The narrative and commercial logic always suggested that this is where Owens was headed. It didn’t make any sense to libel TPUSA as being connected to the murder of its leader and founder — as Owens has for months now — without implicating its new leader, Erika Kirk.

And what is more demented than portraying the wife of the victim of a shocking assassination as a black widow?

Whereas most of us have seen in Erika Kirk a Christian woman bearing up under an intolerable burden and stunningly forgiving the alleged murderer of her husband, Owens purports to see Clytemnestra, the mythical Greek figure who betrayed her husband Agamemnon

As a so-called investigator, Owens is like Perry Mason if the fictional attorney had been a schizophrenic high on crack. Her method is to pile will-o’-the-wisp connections one on top of another.

Her mantra is that “we don’t know-know, but we know” — in other words, her malicious, irrational intuitions are superior to actual knowledge backed by facts.

Usually, conspiracy theories spring up around assassinations that are hard to fathom, or have some ambiguity about them. It is clear that Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone in killing JFK, but it’s understandable that there have been questions about the event.

It is the depraved achievement of Candace Owens to make a bonkers true crime drama, with all sorts of mysteries and twists, out of an open-and-shut murder case.

Kirk’s accused killer, Tyler Robinson, had a motive, left a trail of damning evidence and confessed to multiple people. To dismiss all this and call for Erika Kirk to be frogmarched into a police station is so mad it makes Owens’ conviction that the moon landing and dinosaurs are fake look well-grounded

It is a symptom of our time that such malevolent buffoonery is rewarded with a huge audience.

It is impossible to discredit Owens because she is not in the credibility business to begin with. In the attention economy, denunciations are just as useful as praise, especially if a media figure is posing as a brave truth-teller — so brave that, in this case, she’s willing to drag through a mud a mother of two who saw her beloved husband murdered less than six months ago.

It’s not just that decency is not necessary in the Candace Owens business model, it would be an obstacle.