The first thing we did when Judge Roy Moore went down to defeat in Alabama was go up on the Internet and re-read George Washington’s farewell address. That is the parchment in which Washington stressed the importance of religion in our political life. “Whatever may be conceded to the influence of refined education on minds of peculiar structure,” he warned, “reason and experience both forbid us to expect that national morality can prevail in exclusion of religious principle.”

There is no doubt that Judge Moore was a terrible tribune of this idea. He was as wrong as a judge can be when twice as chief justice of Alabama he defied the supremacy of the federal courts. He did it once over same sex marriage and once over his decision to the display in the lobby of the state courthouse carvings of the Ten Commandments. The Ten Commandments case was precisely to mark Washington’s point about religion — or, as Moore put it, to “acknowledge the sovereignty of God.”

Tens of millions of Americans yearn for such an acknowledgment. Judge Moore made that yearning the central theme of his campaign. He probably would have won the election absent the Democrats’ campaign to destroy his personal reputation over sex. He was left to deny allegations that were beyond statutorial limitations and thus beyond the reach of due process. All’s fair in politics, of course, and it may just be that there was, as Matt Drudge put it, just “too much crazy.”

Mr. Drudge also made the point that the Republican incumbent, Senator Luther Strange, appointed to fill the seat Senator Sessions vacated to become attorney general, would have won the election had he managed to gain the Republican nomination. That is another way of saying that President Trump was right originally to back Mr. Strange over Judge Moore. The Times is already mocking Mr. Trump for trying to make the best of a bad situation by backing the nominee the Alabama GOP chose.

All of it puts the 2018 election into sharp relief. The Republicans will now go into that election with their control of the Senate hanging by a single vote. The good news, the Wall Street Journal points out in its editorial this morning, is that Judge Moore won’t be available for Democrats to make an issue of during the battle for control of the Senate. The GOP has a better chance to expand its majority than it would have had Judge Moore won. Better still if it gets its jobs-and-growth tax bill passed before Senator Strange retires to Alabama.