As he tries to cement his newfound position as a leader in the Republican presidential primary campaign, Rick Santorum has embraced a favorite tactic among GOP pols: attacking the media. Complaints from Santorum and his aides that journalists unduly focused on the candidate’s views on social policy have, at least, succeeded in making “Is the media ganging up on Santorum?” one of the storylines of the campaign.

The complaints are, for the most part, unfounded. Nate Silver of The New York Times has found that coverage of Santorum does, in fact, focus more on controversial social policy issues than does coverage of rival candidates. But there’s a good reason for that: Santorum’s positions on those issues are farther from current policy, and over the course of his career he’s articulated those positions with an enthusiasm that suggests they would inform his approach to governance. Most contemporary presidential candidates don’t make a point of talking about how they would prosecute hotel-room pornography from the White House, and most haven’t given speeches about how Satan is destroying important American institutions, including religious institutions, in a “spiritual war.” So some extra media attention to both Santorum’s rhetoric and his substantive agenda on social issues is appropriate.

But that extra scrutiny needs to reflect careful attention to what Santorum is actually saying. In one recent episode, unfortunately, it hasn’t. As The New Yorker’s John Cassidy has already noted, this week’s storyline—the continuing fallout from Santorum’s “phony theology” remarks in Ohio over the weekend—has at times come untethered.

Via the conservative media watchdog site Newsbusters.org, here’s what Santorum told a group of Tea Party activists in Columbus:

The price of fuel right now, they’re talking maybe by the summer we’re looking at $5 a gallon. Why? Why? Because this president systematically is doing everything he can to raise the price of energy in this country. He’s shutting down all sorts of opportunities for us to drill for oil. He’s now trying to infuse not science when it comes to the environment, not environmental science when it comes to drilling wells for oil and gas in Pennsylvania and North Dakota and other places that use hydraulic fracking.

He’s trying to do again what he tried to do with global warming. Instead of using climate science or global science he uses political science. And political science in this case is suggesting that a technology that has been successfully used to drill hundreds of thousands of wells in this country, hundreds of thousands of oil and gas wells, all of a sudden now that’s a dangerous technology. Why? Because it could lead to lower energy prices. That’s the dangerousness of this technology. It doesn’t fit his pattern of trying to drive down consumption, driving to drive up your cost of transportation to accomplish his political science goal of reducing carbon dioxide emissions.

This is what the president’s agenda is. It’s not about you. It’s not about you. It’s not about your quality of life. It’s not about your jobs. It’s about some phony ideal, some phony theology. Oh, not a theology based on the Bible, a different theology.

This is admittedly a little hard to parse, because Santorum uses a handful of words differently than many people would use them. One of them is “political science,” by which he seems to mean something like politicized science. The other is “theology,” which he uses where many people might use “ideology.” (In fact, the initial Washington Post blog post about Santorum’s remarks misquoted him, putting the words “phony ideology” in his mouth instead.)

That choice—“theology” over “ideology”—and the following line about “not a theology based on the Bible,” is consequential. Santorum is charging that Obama’s policy agenda stems from a fully-fledged, coherent worldview that is not, as Santorum believes it should be, rooted in a correct understanding of Christian scripture. (This was the explanation he offered Sunday on Face the Nation, and it’s consistent with his original remarks.) That’s a substantive, politically important critique that reporters should interrogate.

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