On the evidence of yesterday’s congressional hearings, either Roger Clemens is the victim of a broad conspiracy to paint him as a drug fiend, or the man is something like a sociopath, unable to feel empathy or remorse, quite capable of lying without affect.

Clemens has less than no credibility, so I would tend to believe the second explanation if not for the fact that his former trainer, Brian McNamee, has, astonishingly, even less. One almost starts to wonder if a drug dealer, a mysterious nanny, and Andy Pettitte, among others, might really be in league against the best pitcher in major league history. Clemens offers aggressively stupid and implausible defenses for various alleged criminal actions, but McNamee, an absolutely unbelievable figure directly out of an A.J. Liebling piece, comes off as the sort of nervous delinquent you’d see lingering outside a bodega. The rift between the former friends is tragic. Rarely have two men so deserved each other.

McNamee, a former policeman turned steroid dealer and informant, who styled himself Dr. McNamee on the basis of worthless credentials earned at a nonexistent institution, claims that he used to inject Clemens and his wife Debbie with performance-enhancing drugs. He has produced needles and drugs, kept in a can, that he says can prove what he’s saying. On the other hand, he is by his own admission the sort of person who keeps used steroid needles in a can.

Clemens has already denied the charges, putting himself at risk of jail time, and when he denied them again yesterday, he did so with his by now familiar mechanical certainty and fervor. He is like a big knot of muscles, and he seems capable of thinking only one thought at a time, which is a useful thing in a pitcher and an unnerving thing in a witness.

One moment Clemens was saying, “I believe Andy has misheard!” to explain to Rep. Elijah Cummings, a Democrat of Maryland, why what Pettitte swore was an intimate confession of drug use was actually a conversation about some old men Clemens had seen on television. The next moment he was talking about his mother, who worked three jobs and still couldn’t afford to send him to college. The next he was cracking jokes about what hat will be on his Hall of Fame plaque. The next he was denying that he had ever bled through the seat of his pants because he’d been injecting drugs in his rear.

There is only slightly more chance that Clemens is not lying than there is that Manhattan will drift into the sea tonight. McNamee has his can of needles, and Pettitte and Chuck Knoblauch both admit that McNamee’s claims that he injected them with drugs are true. According to Cummings, even Mrs. Pettitte says that Pettitte told her that Clemens told him that he had taken human growth hormone.

In addition to all of this, Rep. Henry Waxman, a Democrat of California, all but accused Clemens of witness tampering in relation to a nanny who can place Clemens at a party at Jose Canseco’s house where McNamee says shady business was conducted. The former Texas Longhorn invited the nanny over to his house last weekend. It was to help Congress, he said.

Whether this, or Clemens’s sad cry to Rep. Bruce Braley, a Democrat of Iowa, when asked if he has ever been a vegan (“I don’t know what that is!”), was the most mind-searingly stupid moment of the hearings, is a hard call to make, but it should be noted that Waxman’s disclosures were met with the sight of hollering shyster lawyers, including one who once represented President Clinton, and much gavel-banging.

Only a confessed serial liar such as McNamee could lend any credence to Clemens’s preposterous denials, but so he did. It was almost sad. There was for him no transcendent moment such as Clemens offered several times; he had nothing to offer but the twitchy nervousness of a man who knows he isn’t believed.

By now, regular readers will doubtless be tired of the point, but like other hearings on drug use and baseball, this was a genuinely obscene waste of public money and public time. One would rather not be shrill about it, but the representatives who participated in this farce degraded the institution they serve and proved themselves unfit to hold elected office. Previous hearings had at least some theoretical connection to the legitimate business of the Congress, dealing as they did with proposed legislation and the broad workings of a $6 billion industry that relies on heavy public subsidies. The Clemens/McNamee dispute has nothing to do with anything, baseball most of all.

tmarchman@nysun.com