Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell's condemnation this week of the "loony lies" espoused by freshman Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, R-Ga., was spot on, but incomplete. If McConnell and other putatively serious Republican politicians truly want to take back their party from the fringe elements that threaten to engulf it, they must confront former President Donald Trump's continuing lies and forthrightly tell the millions of Republicans who believe the Nov. 3 election was stolen that they are wrong.

That is a far more pressing problem than one deranged congresswoman, and it'll test the courage and leadership skills of GOP chiefs who have spent the past four years deferring to Trump on everything.

Greene is an adherent of QAnon — the insane right-wing movement that alleges top national Democrats are blood-drinking pedophiles — and other unhinged belief systems. Greene in the recent past has endorsed calls for violence against top Democrats and has claimed the 9/11 attacks were a hoax, that Jewish space lasers started the California wildfires, that the Clintons assassinated John F. Kennedy Jr. by causing a 1999 plane crash and that the mass school shootings at Parkland, Florida, and Newtown, Connecticut, were staged "false flag" events. Yet House Republican leaders assigned Greene to the Education and Labor Committee — a slap in the face to the grieving parents of kids killed in those school shootings.

Greene's dangerous ascension to Congress didn't happen in a vacuum. She is a die-hard Trump supporter who stoked the former president's base to elevate herself, and who now vociferously backs Trump's false claim that he won the Nov. 3 election by "a landslide." In truth, of course, he lost by 7 million votes and a wide Electoral College margin.

McConnell, the personification of the GOP establishment, has long tolerated Trump's antics and lies as the price of his cherished tax cuts and conservative judges. After the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol, though, McConnell indicated he'd had enough. That burst of responsibility was, unfortunately, short-lived. McConnell ultimately stalled a vote on Trump's impeachment trial until after the president's term expired, and now argues he can't be convicted because his term has expired. How convenient.

McConnell's comments Monday condemning Greene (without naming her) were important because he seemed to acknowledge the GOP today is especially susceptible to this kind of nonsense. "Loony lies and conspiracy theories are cancer for the Republican Party and our country," McConnell said.

But where is McConnell's denunciation of the even more damaging lies that Trump continues to promote, especially the corrosive myth that the nation's elections are corrupt? McConnell keeps hiding behind tenuous legal excuses to let Trump off the hook, instead of leading a badly needed bipartisan repudiation of his behavior.

Greene is just a symptom. Trumpism is the real cancer. And now, as for the past four years, his party appears willing, in cowardly fashion, to silently let it spread.

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