The pundit class is laughing over a prank announcement that showed Vice President Pence filing to run for the 2024 Republican nomination president. Yet in a Washington where the term “unserious” is emerging as an insult, the earnest Hoosier would be a serious candidate indeed.

For a hoax to work, it needs an air of truth, and Mr. Pence has been walking a traditional path to a run for president. He is a statesman who, before becoming vice president, served as a member of the House of Representatives, governor, and — like President Reagan — honed his communication skills on radio.

The former vice president also published what could be called a campaign biography, his memoir, “So Help Me God,” with the tagline: “Loyalty is a Vice President’s first duty, but there is a greater one — to God and the Constitution.”

That sentiment echoes the oath for federal* office upon which our republic rests. The oath is to “support and defend the Constitution of the United States,” it reads, “against all enemies, foreign and domestic… So help me God.”  

Domestic foes will be hyped by Democrats leading into 2024, and Mr. Pence’s stand against them will set him apart from President Trump’s tarnished image should the former vice president challenge his old running mate and turn the joke into a prophecy.

“On January 6, 2021,” the promotional summary of Mr. Pence’s book reads, “as the president pressured him to overturn the election, a mob erected a gallows on Capitol Hill and its members chanted ‘Hang Mike Pence!’ as they rampaged through the halls of Congress.”

Yet “The vice president refused to leave the Capitol, and once the riot was quelled, he reconvened Congress to complete the work of a peaceful transfer of power.” As Mr. Pence writes in the prelude to his book, “I had always been loyal to President Donald Trump.”

Amid the storm of protests that day, though, “things had to be different. For my first loyalty was to the Constitution.” Most candidates promise to uphold the nation’s highest law, but Mr. Pence alone today can say he’s done it in the face of a gallows. 

During his radio career, Mr. Pence described himself as “Rush Limbaugh on decaf,” and I can’t help but recall my late boss’s frequent warnings that the Constitution is just “a piece of paper that, for over 250 years, has been respected simply because it exists.”

Mr. Pence, in effect, held that piece of paper in his hands on January 6, and he chose not to tear it up but to respect that it did not invest him with the power to set aside the Electoral College count as Mr. Trump’s supporters were demanding he do.

There’s another incident where Mr. Pence’s character — a presidential quality outlined in 69 Federalist, “The Real Character of the Executive” — took center stage. At Broadway’s “Hamilton,” named for the author of that installment of the Federalist, the actors used their curtain call to scold the vice president over the issue of immigration law and gay rights.

Mr. Pence said he “wasn’t offended” and would, “leave to others whether that was the appropriate venue” for such politicking. As he had listened to the left-wing crowd boo, he recalls, “I nudged my kids and reminded them, ‘That’s what freedom sounds like.’”

Imagine Mr. Trump’s reaction in those circumstances, much less that of President Biden, who might challenge the actors and audience to push-up contests or insult them as a one-horse pony as he has others who confronted him.

Mr. Pence told ABC News, “I think we’ll have better choices in the future,” and not only would he make a spectacular candidate, but his wife, Karen, would be an exemplary first lady, having stood up for her First Amendment right to teach Sunday school despite some Democrats suggesting she be stripped of Secret Service protection as punishment.

The prankster who threw Mr. Pence’s hat in the ring no doubt meant it as sport, but why not take him up on it? As the Sun has written before, America would be well served by a President Pence who keeps the Constitution as his North Star and remains caffeine-free in the eye of our nation’s many storms.

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* An oath to support the Constitution of the United States is also required of all who hold state offices or judgeships or who are members of state legislatures.