It was the moment that Mitt Romney’s campaign has been promising all along, and yet it still caught President Obama and his campaign by surprise — the Etch-a-Sketch moment. It happened on the stage of the first presidential debate in Denver, where Mitt Romney, already backed into a corner, pulled off a desperate maneuver to save his floundering campaign: he lied, unabashedly and unapologetically, in front of millions of Americans, and the president let him do it.

But why didn’t the president call him out? And just how bad was Mr. Romney’s dissembling?

The second question is easier to answer because it’s the most obvious. During the course of this 90-minute debate, Mr. Romney lied about his tax policy, his health care plan (so grossly that his own campaign issued a correction after the debate was over) and his budget’s draconian cuts to Medicaid and education. Heck, he even walked back on his 47 percent comments after the debate was over.

Sure he lied, but he lied unapologetically, and thus his debate performance was labeled a victory by his campaign staff and the media at large in the immediate aftermath of the debate. But that afterglow only lasted about a day before the fact checkers descended upon Mr. Romney’s debate performance (and it was a performance, all style and no substance).

But I suppose that doesn’t matter to the Romney campaign as, after all, their campaign won’t be dictated by the fact checkers.

The second question, on President Obama’s non-existent debate performance, is much trickier to address. Was he tired and uninterested in participating in the debate, or so taken aback by Mr. Romney’s Etch-a-Sketch ploy that he was left scrambling for a response? Clearly, he walked onto that stage expecting a different opponent than the one he ended up debating, and even more clearly, there is no love lost between these two men.

Most Americans hold an unrealistic ideal in their heads of what a presidential debate is. They picture it as a meaningful dialogue, an interrogation of the participants’ policies and politics, and above all, they imagine that the debate will be civil. This is not what debates are about, if they ever were. The modern presidential debate is about image and pageantry and nothing more.

Remember how Romney’s debate prep team told The New York Times that they were drilling their candidate on so-called “zingers” for the debate? That is the stuff of modern politicking. What was the top critique of the president’s performance? That he wasn’t zinging right back. Instead, he made unadorned and substantive points, disengaging through the most awkward parts of the debate and letting Mr. Romney control the conversation.

While it was underwhelming, and left many liberal insta-pundits reeling in disbelief, the president’s debate performance might end up being a blessing in disguise for Team Obama. Since Mitt Romney was the star of the first debate, all the scrutiny naturally fell upon him. And since his debate performance amounted to one gross untruth after another, it can now be said with certainty that Mitt Romney will say absolutely anything to win the presidency, even if that means lying on a national debate stage before tens of millions of Americans.

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Apolitical is a blog that covers current events, politics and culture from a progressive perspective—bringing the world at large to the Malibubble, one post at a time.