Back in mid-2001, when Mayor Rudy Giuliani was busy committing adultery, lurching into his divorce and third marriage and rooming with a gay couple he promised to marry as soon as the law allowed, who among us would have imagined that one day he would be endorsed for president by Pat Robertson? Truly, Sept. 11 changed everything.

Actually, Robertson, the founder of the Christian Broadcasting Network, has had peculiar positions on the terror attack. He once said it was nowhere near as big a deal as the problem of judicial activism, and on another occasion he explained that the destruction of the World Trade Center was God’s punishment for abortion and “rampant secularism” on television. It’s hard to understand what drew the two men together. Rudy has hedged his positions on quite a few issues lately — but he has yet to suggest that New York had it coming.

It’s been quite a busy time for Giuliani, who recently tried to establish himself as the toughest dude on the anti-terror block by making fun of torture victims, drawing the wrath of John (Actually Tortured) McCain. Let it be known that nothing, including the extensive evidence that prisoners being tortured confess to things that aren’t true, is going to stop a President Giuliani from wringing every last drop of inaccurate information out of the evildoers.

“They talk about sleep deprivation. I mean on that theory, I’m getting tortured running for president of the United States. That’s plain silly,” he said at a town hall meeting in Iowa. You would really think after all the trouble Mitt Romney got for equating life in the Mitt Mobile with service in Iraq, people would be a little careful about comparing the perils of the campaign trail with military service. It also gave McCain the opportunity to remind the nation that Rudy got a deferral from serving in Vietnam by convincing his boss, a federal judge, to pull strings and have him declared an “essential” civilian employee for his critical work as a law clerk. But we digress.

Robertson’s backing will surely give Giuliani a leg up among voters who believe that God sends natural disasters to punish Americans whose school board members believe in the theory of evolution, or who have the bad luck to live near an inclusive amusement park. (He warned Orlando that when Disney World welcomed gay patrons it was letting them in for terrorist attacks, “earthquakes, tornadoes and possibly a meteor.”)

Yesterday, Robertson said that America’s Mayor had won him over because “to me, the overriding issue before the American people is the defense of our population from the bloodlust of Islamic terrorists.” (So much for judicial activism.) “Our second goal should be the control of massive government waste and crushing federal deficits.”

Now this is the part that I have never been able to get. When did government spending become part of the divine agenda? Is there something in the Bible about smiting down federal bureaucrats?

Even within the ranks of the social conservatives, Robertson is regarded as a tad over the top. Who among us will forget the time he claimed that the special protein shake he was marketing had enabled him to leg-press 2,000 pounds? Or the time he said God had given Ariel Sharon a massive stroke because he let the Palestinians run Gaza? (He did apologize for saying the United States should assassinate the president of Venezuela.)

Still, the endorsement must have been a blow to Mitt Romney. He has gotten a couple of social conservatives on his side. But given the way he’s prostrated himself before the right wing, renouncing every position he’s ever held, all the way down to stem cells, you’d think he’d do better. It’s a mystery why even someone as loopy as Robertson would pass up the exhaustingly virtuous family man for a longtime hound dog like Rudy, who has been qualifying his liberal social positions but never really retracting them.

“Persuasion is an important part of politics. It may be for some leaders, Giuliani is more persuasive, particularly in private,” suggested John Green, who studies conservative religious movements for the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life.

It does seem true that miraculous things happen when conservative leaders meet with Giuliani behind closed doors. Maybe they just find Mitt Romney extremely irritating. Maybe Rudy has a secret grip, like the Vulcan mind-meld or one of those sleeper holds they used to have in professional wrestling, that fills his victims with an irrational degree of trust. Or maybe his leadership is so powerful that people exposed to it find it impossible to doubt the sincerity of his every word.

In which case I’ve got a protein shake I’d like to sell you.