Some of the greatest New York-set stories in American literature concern the often destructive toll of the reinvention of one's self. At first glance, this idea can seem odd: The Empire State, after all, is not exactly known for its low self-esteem — until you get upstate, that is.

The examples can fill a library, or several. North Dakota-born bootlegger Jimmy Gatz moves to the tony provinces of Long Island and crafts a luxe new identity as Jay Gatsby in F. Scott Fitzgerald's classic tale of blighted ambition. In Theodore Dreiser's "An American Tragedy," feckless midwesterner Clyde Griffiths tries to better his social station in Lycurgus, the fictional upstate industrial town, and finds himself desperately trying to untangle himself from the poor farm girl he impregnates before falling into the orbit of the rich socialite who can transform him. Needless to say, the farm girl ends up drowned in Big Moose Lake in the heart of the Adirondacks. And not to spread spoilers, but things don't work out too well for Gatsby or Griffiths, either.

Big Moose Lake, which unlike Lycurgus is a real place, is located west of Bolton Landing, the lakefront community where Tommy Muscatello Jr. grew up. Muscatello, who is my nominee for most delightful newsmaker of spring 2018, is a real person, though he is far better known for his recently exposed fictional alter ego, Thomas J. Mace-Archer-Mills.

It's been more than two weeks since Muscatello's playacting as a media-friendly toff and self-described British monarchy expert was described by the Wall Street Journal's Bradley Hope, who chronicled how the changeling had adopted his hyper-hyphenated name — one wonders why he neglected to add an "Ascot," "Saxon" or "Stokes-Wimbledon" — and created something called the British Monarchist Society & Foundation. According to its website, this organization "came about as an educated and popular response to the rising tide of republicanism within the United Kingdom, which had gone largely unquestioned and unbalanced." Mace-Archer-Mills is also listed as the editor-in-chief of Crown & Country Magazine, "Britain's Royal Themed Luxury Periodical."

As someone who has covered New York politics for the better part of a decade, I am sympathetic to any upstate resident who in early adulthood runs into the arms of another form of government. Still, Muscatello clearly took things too far, earning ample comparisons to Rachel Dolezal, aka Nkechi Amare Diallo, who posed as a black woman while running the Spokane, Wash., chapter of the NAACP. (According to charges filed three weeks ago, she also committed welfare fraud and perjury over a two-year period.)

Muscatello's camouflage involved recruiting elderly Brits to pose as his grandfather and grandmother as needed — a tactic that I seem to recall was employed by Tom Ripley, the charming sociopath — another New Yorker when we first meet him — at the center of Patricia Highsmith's quintet of brilliant thrillers on the theme of reinvention.

Muscatello did a lot of interviews with reporters from outside the United Kingdom, possibly because they would be far less likely to recognize that his fake British accent was an abominable mishmash of various dialects. He apparently cut his teeth, Henry Higgins-wise, in a high school staging of "Oliver!" His more recent performances are not quite as bad as Keanu Reeves' San-Diego-meets-Oxford tones from Francis Ford Coppola's gonzo version of "Dracula," but they're close.

TV reporters ate up Muscatello's elfin advice to Meghan Markle as she prepared to marry Prince Harry — counsel that he was offering up without disclosing that they hailed from the same proud nation, albeit from different coasts.

"She is loud, she is American, she fights for her cause — we don't do that here," Muscatello said in one segment. "We do things quietly, with dignity."

After the Wall Street Journal story ran, Muscatello insisted the paper had "breached journalistic trust" and "omitted truths" without listing them.

I have a hard time being anything other than amused by Muscatello, primarily because, like many things having to do with Britain's royal family, his masquerade has no impact on most of the rest of Planet Earth, unless you consider lazy talent-bookers and excessively credulous anglophiles to be worthy of your sympathy.

His case is, for example, considerably different from that of Sergio Garcia, the former chief of staff of SUNY Upstate Medical University, whose self-aggrandizing lies about his career and associations were exposed by this paper several weeks ago. Muscatello's posh accent might be a joke, but he's not claiming to have been present at a bombing that took the life of a young diplomat in order to make himself look more battle-hardened.

Remember that Muscatello comes from Bolton Landing, a community that — like many in the Adirondacks — is where one segment of society comes to play while another segment lives and works. (This aspect of Dreiser's "An American Tragedy" — based on a real murder — hasn't aged much.) Such an upbringing no doubt presents rich lessons class differences, distinctions that many Americans insist were left behind when we abandoned the British Empire almost two-and-a-half centuries ago.

cseiler@timesunion.com • 518-454-5619