Former President Bill Clinton learned that current Attorney General Loretta Lynch was on an airplane on the same tarmac in Arizona today, and the two decided to chat for a bit before going along their way. Clinton has been known for such impromptu social meetings on a regular basis, once even chatting up republican candidate Ted Cruz on a tarmac despite the two men having almost nothing in common politically. But it took all of a few minutes today for the republican conspiracy nuts to spin Bill’s conversation with Loretta Lynch into an abominable part of a fictional Hillary Clinton conspiracy. Science fiction, in fact.

In the deluded minds of the republican conspiracy theorists, Bill Clinton cornered the Attorney General as some kind of last ditch effort to either beg or bribe or threaten her not to “indict” Hillary Clinton for the imaginary email scandal, or the imaginary Benghazi scandal, or whatever insane thing happened to pop into their heads this time. Nevermind that the FBI has repeatedly clarified that Hillary is a not a target of its email investigation of a Romanian hacker who compromised the State Department server that Hillary wasn’t using, and nevermind that Attorney General Loretta Lynch has nothing to do with the FBI. Because, of course, the facts don’t matter.

Bill Clinton probably should have known that his decision to have a casual social conversation with a fellow politician from his own party would end up being spun into yet another vicious false narrative by the republicans. After all, the Clintons have long lived in a world where they have to think through every single word they say or thing they do in advance, for fear of how the republicans will find a way to spin it into yet another lunatic conspiracy theory.

But it appears that the republican lies about this particular meeting haven’t had any real impact. It was intermittently a story on cable news for part of the day, but by the afternoon most of the networks had seemingly already determined that they couldn’t turn it into a ratings-worthy storyline and moved on to other things. Donald Trump briefly tried to play it up but didn’t get anywhere with it either.

What Trump and the republicans still haven’t figured out is that the nutjob lies and science fiction conspiracy theories they make up about the Clintons may play well with their own lunatic base, but there’s almost never any impact on those in the mainstream who seem to have long ago figured out that any ridiculous claim they hear about Bill or Hillary Clinton is indeed likely to have been made up by the other side.