The Modern Forgery Hypothesis

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Including my assessment of the character of  Wilfrd and the other persons involved.

I often equate problems like this with the rules and practices of law and law enforcement. I find that in legal cases, in a fair system, we have distilled many factors down to essentials, in order to render just and accurate verdicts, because people's lives depend on it. We don't want to make mistakes!

In this case, your judging the character of Wilfrid, I agree it is a factor. Or lack thereof is a factor. And your pointing this out reminded me of the time in the 1980's when I was the Foreman of a Jury in a Federal trial of two police officers. The prosecutor was a brilliant young lawyer, a woman who worked in Guiliani's law team, when he was DA.

The instructions from the judge, before we retired to the jury room, included the admonition that (paraphrasing) "If you find that a witness or defendant lied about one aspect of their testimony, you are free to throw out all of their other testimony along with it". 

Well that prosecutor deftly eviscerated a couple of key witnesses for the defense, by demonstrating how they had lied in the past... even in issues unrelated to the trial at hand. One of them confronted a witness with an old tax return, which had on it... I think it was 13 "dependents". Children. She asked him to name them. He could not. So, as jurors, we where then allowed to discard all his other testimony as unreliable.

If this was a case up for trial, us witnesses would be allowed to throw out all of Wilfrid's testimony, as he was a proven liar. I only "trust" as far as it can be proven correct, which is not too often. But with all such witness testimony, it often reveals information that the originator never intended... so it can be useful to some extent, but not for it's truthfulness.

Well we do this, ourselves, in day to day social interactions. That friend who brags about how they rip everyone else off all the time? We don't leave them around our own possessions. The one who likes to talk about how high they get? Not gonna babysit for us. Behavior and reliability and truthfulness in one area rightly affects our judging a person in all areas... whether fair or not, it is practical, common sense.