Meet the quitting quintet: Pat Toomey, Richard Burr, Rob Portman, Richard Shelby, and its latest member, Roy Blunt.

That’s five Republican senators who will bail out in 2022. And let’s be perfectly Blunt about why they’re doing it:

They have no desire to be further infected by the mutating MAGA virus (even if they were to win in 2022), or to risk being killed by it (if they were to be primaried and defeated by Trumpist challenges in 2022). As loyal as most of them were to the now-deposed “president,” they’d rather retire than soil themselves further by wearing the MAGA armband yet again.

Brendan Buck, a top aide to ex-House Speakers John Boehner and Paul Ryan, tweeted not long ago, “Congress is no place for a sensible Republican anymore.” And yesterday, Republican commentator Amanda Carpenter put it more Bluntly: “The rash of GOP retirements, likely to avoid Trump madness in the primaries, shows you Trump still isn’t done destroying the party. Onwards we go.”

When five senators from one party bail out this way, the temptation is to say that it’s potentially good news for the other party. And, yes, Democrats do have pickup potential in at least one of those states – my own Pennsylvania, which blessedly voted blue in 2020. But the real story here is what’s happening inside the GOP, which has plummeted from “the party of Lincoln” to the playtoy of the Mar-a-Lago loser.

Lindsey Graham, arguably the lowest of the lickspittles, said it all during a TV interview on Sunday night: “Donald Trump…can make (the GOP) bigger. He can make it stronger…And he can also destroy it.”

The five bailing Republican senators – most of them still in their senatorial prime -essentially decided that life is too short. What’s the point of joining the GOP’s kamikaze act of self-destruction? Or, at the very least, why stick around and be subsumed by its surrender to a cult of (twisted) personality? Why take a loyalty test to a loser who cost the party the White House and both congressional chambers? Why risk sharing the fate of Lisa Murkowski, who voted last month to convict in the Senate impeachment trial – and who has now been personally targeted by Trump (he calls her “very disloyal”)? Why risk the humiliation of being bounced in a ’22 primary by Trumpist challengers who are even more nuts than insurrectionist Josh Hawley?

Missouri, home of imminent retiree Roy Blunt, is the perfect example. If he had decided to run for re-election, he faced a potential primary challenge from Trump mini-me Eric Greitens. If you’re not familiar with Greitens, this recap will suffice: Elected as governor in 2016, he didn’t last two years. He became enmeshed in an unwanted sexual contact scandal, was later charged with two felony counts of illegally using a charity donor list, and ultimately resigned rather than face impeachment. Also, this past December, he said that Joe Biden’s decisive win was fake. In other words, he’s the perfect Trumpist senatorial candidate in 2022.

So what we’ll see, in the ’22 midterms, is a virtual referendum on the future direction of what was once a respectable Republican party. As bad as the quitting quintet generally was – four of the five voted twice to exonerate Trump during the impeachment trials – there is still room for their successors to sink even lower. After all, the departure of Richard Burr in North Carolina potentially opens the door for Trump daughter-in-law Lara.

The cosmic question, going forward, is whether America can be run effectively if it has only one party that still believes in facts and democracy.