In the course of his remarkable rise from cable sideshow to Fox News superstar, Glenn Beck has never really faced a serious challenge.

To both men and women, his opponents only made him stronger, strengthening his every-guy-against-the-world image and putting some meat on the bones of his near paranoid ravings about dark forces aligning against liberty, and himself. When cornered, he only became more vulnerable, more tearful and, at least to his fervent followers, more likable.

But on Tuesday night, Beck faced a foe unlike any other, a pasty, disgraced former one-term Democratic Congressman from New York, Eric Massa, who had resigned only hours earlier amid an ethics inquiry into allegations that he groped and sexually harassed some of his male employees over the years. Massa, who has maintained that his main reason for not running for re-election in the fall is a recurrence of non-Hodgkin's lymphoma, arrived at the Fox studios with an X-ray of his chest and a photo album of pictures from his Navy service that, he announced, "looks like an orgy in Caligula." "I'm going to show you a lot more than tickle fights," Massa told Beck, leaving the host, for a precious moment, speechless.

Massa had come on Fox to out-Beck Glenn Beck. Armed with the very same weapons - a deep sense of victimhood, outrage at the powers that be and remarkable personal candor - the Representative delivered a dizzying confessional. He admitted to sexless groping and tickling of his staff, sending inappropriate text messages and otherwise failing to behave like a Congressman should, all as he made his case that his fellow Democrats had really gone after him because of his previous no vote on health care reform. "I can't fight this. I can't fight cancer," Massa announced, in a classic stream-of-consciousness ramble. "I can't fight the White House. I can't fight the Democratic Party."