Rep. Tom Cole (R-Okla.) had a job to do Wednesday afternoon, and darned if he wasn’t going to do it.

Cole joined the lengthy roster of Republican representatives given the opportunity to nominate their party’s candidate for speaker before a vote in the House — a roster on which he might admittedly already appear, given that the Republican conference is well into the double-digits on such nominations this year. But given that task, his job was to convince the House broadly, his colleagues specifically and the viewing audience potentially of Rep. Jim Jordan’s (R-Ohio) preparedness for the job.

With that goal in mind, he at one point in his speech hailed the chairman of the House Judiciary Committee’s moral fortitude.

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“He is a person of absolute personal integrity,” Cole said of Jordan. “I’ve never once had to question something that he told me. He’s an honorable man.”

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This is a more important testimonial than it might seem. Jordan’s reputation is built to a large extent on his carefully tended bulldog persona, on his apparent willingness to upend dishonesty and to call out bad actors. To cite an admittedly anecdotal example, as I was watching C-SPAN open up the phone lines before Wednesday’s vote, more than one caller indicated that they backed Jordan because they trusted him to dig up dishonesty — including, one suggested, among members of his own party. (This was used to explain...

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