This is an archived article that was published on sltrib.com in 2016, and information in the article may be outdated. It is provided only for personal research purposes and may not be reprinted.

Like Sherlock Holmes noting the significance of the dog that didn't bark, Jason Chaffetz may, or may not, hope that we notice the award he was not nominated for. This year.

Near the close of 2015, an embarrassingly misleading chart that had been held up by the congressman from Utah's 3rd District was a finalist for the more serious version of Esquire's Dubious Achievement Award, PolitiFact's Lie of the Year.

That was Chaffetz's clumsy attempt to play gotcha with the head of Planned Parenthood by basically lying about how many abortions it was performing contrasted with how many cancer screenings it had provided.

In the national, though highly unscientific, survey conducted by the Pulitzer-winning PolitiFact, Chaffetz's fib placed a distant fourth. Behind Donald Trump (American Muslims cheered 9/11). And Donald Trump (81 percent of white murder victims are killed by black people). Aaaaaand Donald Trump (The Mexican government sends criminals to the United States). Bald-faced, pants-on-fire lies, each and every one of them.

This year's list, released by PolitiFact Tuesday, has no mention of Chaffetz. But, like the Yankees of the 1920s, Trump remains a perennial contender.

What's different this year is that the lies tracked by PolitiFact have become so pervasive — and persuasive — that picking a single falsehood proved too difficult, both for the experts and for the online poll.

So, in the spirit of all have won and all must have prizes, the editors' award for Lie of the Year was bestowed upon Fake News. All of it. While the people's choice winner was the Campaign of 2016. Yes, the whole thing.

Specific statements from Trump, about the utterly made-up threat of widespread voter fraud and false claim that he had always opposed the Iraq war, made the 2016 list. So did two separate things that Hillary Clinton said about her email scandal.

The whole report about the rise of fake news, and the influence it may have had on the outcome of the election, is depressing as all hell. PolitiFact explains how a few people make lots of money making stuff up, even as real news organizations continue to scramble to keep the lights on.

Of course, it's all a lot of fun and games, until somebody who is eternally on PolitiFact's Lie of the Year list become Time's Person of the Year for actually getting elected president. And, we must fear, moving from a campaign based on lies to a government based on them.

One of those falsehoods may or may not be Trump's occasional claim that climate change isn't real. That it's a Chinese hoax designed to get us to ruin our economy. And the saying that a lie can get half way around the world by the time the truth gets its boots on has even more meaning when somebody in power might hide the boots.

Thus were people alarmed when the Trump transition team sought, and was denied, a list of government employees whose work had to do with studying and dealing with climate change. One result was news that climate scientists from around the world were furiously downloading climate data onto computers in Canada, where it would be preserved beyond the reach of a Trump official with an itchy delete key.

The immediate image that conjures up, of course, is the end of Ray Bradbury's "Fahrenheit 451." The part where Guy Montag, the book-reading fireman — in a society where a fireman's job is to burn books — flees into the woods and stumbles across the Book People. Those are folks who defy the law without breaking it by memorizing a book and then burning it, hoping for a day when society will again be open to the knowledge they are carrying.

There aren't enough climate scientists in the world, even adding their friends, family and supporters, who could memorize all that data. But Knowledge People are preparing for an age of know-nothingness, by squirreling away data in Toronto and more or less looking to California — where Clinton got twice as many votes as Trump — as a government in exile.

"We've got the scientists, we've got the lawyers and we're ready to fight," Gov. Jerry Brown told the American Geophysical Union meeting in, of course, San Francisco. And, if the new administration shuts down NASA's climate observations, "California will launch it's own damn satellite."

Because they know how. No lie.

George Pyle, a Tribune editorial writer, can recite extensive portions of dialog from "Monty Python and the Holy Grail." gpyle@sltrib.com