“You lie,” huh?

With those two words, an obscure (to use the polite word) Republican congressman from the state famous for firing on Fort Sumter and starting the Civil War leaped into the national spotlight.

Well, it certainly helped that Joe Wilson (not the ambassador whose CIA-agent wife who was outed by a conservative columnist, as it turns out) uttered those words on the floor of the House of Representatives and his target was the president of the United States.

And, of course, it certainly didn’t hurt Just Joe that the forum was the health-insurance-reform debate, which, as the summer proved, has pretty much turned into mud wrestling.

So thanks, Joe, for adding some more mud. It’s just what we were looking for.

Funny how Addison Graves Wilson (His real name, as Gail Collins of the New York Times reports. I guess I’d go by Joe, too.) can tell a lie — “You lie” when President Obama said health-insurance reform would not extend care to illegal immigrants (it won’t, at least not intentionally) — and become an instant celebrity. T-shirts, bumper stickers screaming “You lie.” And Rush Limbaugh, the resident genius on the right, reportedly said he was “ecstatic” when he heard the “You lie” shout.

Enough said.

Also funny how colorful (if that’s the word) Addison Graves’ past stances have been. As Maureen Dowd of the New York Times reports, Addison Graves was once a member of the Sons of Confederate Veterans and was once part of the South Carolina campaign to keep the Confederate flag on top of the state’s Capitol.

OK, so it’s not funny ha-ha. So little is, these days.

What is funny, in the not-ha-ha scheme of things, is the desperation the right-wing displays in trying to Swift Boat health-insurance reform. I mean, Addison Graves is their hero? Sons of the Confederate Veterans?

So naturally, it comes as no surprise that Iowa’s own Steve King (we keep trying to give him to Nebraska, but even Nebraska won’t have him) has jumped to Addison Graves’ defense. And other conservatives have tried to point out that Democrats grumbled during some of George W. Bush’s speeches to Congress, so what’s the big deal?

Well, no Dem ever shouted “You lie,” say, when Bush was trying to explain why America needed to invade Iraq (Saddam had WMD, for those of you with short memories). One of the Democrats might well have, as it turns out, because Bush was either lying or didn’t have a clue. Pick your poison, as somebody once told Cleopatra. Or maybe it was Socrates. I always get the ancient Romans mixed up.

The curious thing is, our health-delivery system is broken. The United States spends 16 or 17 percent of its gross domestic product on health care, and 45 million to 50 million people have no health insurance. France, that evil socialist country whose fries we love, spends 11 percent; everyone is insured.

Various polls show that among Americans, somewhere between only liberals similar to me to around 52 or 55 percent of people support some sort of public-option fix. (If you examine the polls, you’ll find that support for the public option goes up if the word “choice” is included. Hmm.) A new survey, from Mount Sinai School of Medicine researchers, published in the New England Journal of Medicine, reports that 63 percent of American physicians support a public option in health insurance. Another 10 percent go further and support a single co-payer system.

What we need is some kind of reform, not buffoons screaming.

“You lie” is not part of the solution. It’s the problem.