Al Franken, like Elvis, has left the building. Actually, Mr. Franken has left his native New York City and gone westward. While the move is allegedly because he’s seeking a 2008 senatorial seat in Minnesota, there’s also the possibility he’s avoiding the backlash from a recent book, “Pants on Fire: How Al Franken Lies, Smears and Deceives” by Alan Skorski. This book questions the credibility of Mr. Franken’s earlier best seller, “Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them: A Fair and Balanced Look at the Right,” as well as his current book, “The Truth (With Jokes).”

Mr. Skorski, visited The New York Sun recently and explained why he wrote “Pants on Fire,” which rises up the charts after each of Mr. Skorski’s public appearances. He has been on “The O’Reilly Factor,” C-SPAN’s “Booknotes,” National Public Radio, and other talk shows. He said, “Stuart Smalley is an evil man.” No, actually, he said, “Al Franken is an evil man,” but to many viewers of “Saturday Night Live,” Mr. Franken will forever be seen as that benign character, a member of many self-help programs, who was known for his sign-off, “I’m good enough, I’m smart enough, and doggone it, people like me.”

Whether they like Smalley or not, his creator, Mr. Franken, is quite another story. The Harvard graduate who majored in political science has marketed himself as a beacon of truth. His claim is: “I try to hold myself to an impossibly high standard.” Oh, really?

Somewhere in the bowels of my basement office, there’s a copy of Mr. Franken’s first foray onto the political stage. I bought “Rush Limbaugh Is a Big Fat Idiot” in the $1 bin of a local bookstore, out of curiosity, but I never actually read it. I did read Mr. Franken’s huge best seller, “Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them,” which I found a useful warning to all pundits that they should double-check their facts, or else Mr. Franken and his team of college researchers will hold their butts to the fire.

However, I also found that Mr. Franken either deliberately lied in his book or didn’t hold his own writings to the same “impossible standard” he holds for conservatives. He wrote that President Bush said in his 2003 State of the Union address that Saddam Hussein sought uranium from Niger. The president actually said “Africa,” but I suspect this was just Mr. Franken’s attempt to perpetuate the “Bush lied” myth.

So why does Mr. Skorski believe that Mr. Franken is “evil”? He said, “Al Franken’s weapon is smearing people. He delights in destroying people’s reputations, and he does this with lies and distortions.”

In his book, Mr. Skorski exposes not only the lies in Mr. Franken’s books but his continual character assassinations in his Air America Radio broadcasts, which Mr. Skorski has monitored and recorded. He also communicated with Mr. Franken in 30 emails and documents his responses to Mr. Skorski’s challenges.

I had expected during the interview that Mr. Skorski would weigh in on the Air America scandal involving $875,000 in loans from the Bronx based, taxpayer-funded Gloria Wise Boys & Girls Club to the liberal radio network and its former chairman. But Mr. Skorski said he doubts Mr. Franken was involved in any scheme. Yet Mr. Franken did lie in saying he did not know anything about Air America’s debt to the Gloria Wise Boys & Girls Club. Mr. Franken’s signature is on notarized documents of Air America’s liabilities, which listed the club’s donation. According to Mr. Skorski, Mr. Franken airily dismissed the entire matter as trivial on his Air America broadcast.

Mr. Skorski insists that his quarrel with Mr. Franken has nothing to do with ideology. He’s eager to discuss politics with anyone who disagrees with his own conservative positions. “Franken, however, attacks those who disagree with him on a very personal level. He twists what they say and then says to his audience, ‘I never lie. You can trust me.'” Mr. Skorski wrote his book because no one in the mainstream press, liberal or conservative, takes Mr. Franken to task for these distortions. Mr. Skorski provides an exhaustive account of how Mr. Franken indicts conservative pundits for picayune mistakes while he commits himself the larger distortions he accuses them of.

What “Pants on Fire” also does is clarify the meaning of the word “lie.” Everyone makes mistakes, but Al Franken prefers to label other people’s mistakes as lies. He also claims that when he makes mistakes, he immediately owns up to them. Mr. Skorski’s “Pants on Fire” not only discredits that claim, it exposes Franken as possibly the most dishonest pundit on the political scene.

Doggone it, Al, seems like everybody likes Stuart, but not you.