Mark Hemingway interviewed the former senator on his Romney endorsement. As the senator tells it, one event that helped him to decide was an encounter with a McCain supporter at a dinner last week. “I ran into someone who was with the McCain campaign and I know had spent some time down in Florida, that walked up to me at an event and before I could even say hello said, ‘We beat you.’ And I thought that to be a rather odd statement because I wasn’t on the ballot. So who is ‘you’? Who did they beat? They surely didn’t beat me, Rick Santorum.” The former senator took the McCainite to be boasting that the campaign had beaten conservatives as a group.

The dinner, Santorum has elsewhere said, was for the Susan B. Anthony List, which works to elect pro-life women. I was at that dinner. It was not exactly crawling with people hostile to conservatives. Perhaps the senator misinterpreted the remark?