Aside from the terrible human cost, there’s a critically important lesson in Iran’s downing of Ukraine flight PS752 over Tehran — namely, that the Iranian regime is led by pathological liars.

The accident itself seems to have been the result of a poorly trained air defense unit and frayed nerves. Seemingly out of contact with civilian air traffic controllers, the missile unit may have thought that flight PS752’s post-takeoff radar contact was actually an intermittent track on a stealth bomber. Perhaps they assumed this was America’s response to Iran’s missile strikes on U.S. forces in Iraq. But if the downing itself was an accident, Iran’s response to it was anything but. On the contrary, we now know it to have been a galling example of willful deception.