The Rachel Dolezal saga keeps getting weirder by the day. Today's revelations, detailed in this CNN article, involve her brother Ezra who visited Spokane 3 years ago - just about the time that Dolezal was ramping up her visibility in the civil rights community. Ezra says that Rachel asked him at the time not to "blow her cover" as a black woman, even though the brother believed she was in "blackface."

On that day three years ago, he said, his sister Rachel Dolezal, 37, told him she was starting life anew in Spokane, Washington, where she's now head of the local chapter of the NAACP and chairwoman of a police oversight committee.

Ezra Dolezal came to visit her from Montana, where their parents live. His adopted sister was on her way to becoming one of the most prominent faces in Spokane's black community.

"She told me not to blow her cover about the fact that she had this secret life or alternate identity," Ezra Dolezal said Saturday. "She told not to tell anybody about Montana or her family over there. She said she was starting a new life ... and this one person over there was actually going to be her black father."

Dolezal's race has come under question after her estranged mother claimed she is white but is "being dishonest and deceptive with her identity."

Dolezal has identified herself as at least partly African-American but her Montana birth certificate states she was born to two parents who say they are Caucasian. The parents shared that document and old photos with CNN.

"I kind of saw it coming," Ezra Dolezal said of the controversy. "Instead of sticking to a simple story, she's been trying to make this really complex and it finally got too big for her to handle."

CNN has tried to reach Rachel Dolezal for comment by emailing and calling her but was unsuccessful. The Spokane Spokesman-Review newspaper reported, though, that she has framed the controversy surrounding her racial identity in the context of litigation over guardianship of her adopted brother.

"We are her birth parents," Lawrence Dolezal told CNN on Friday. "We do not understand why she feels it's necessary to misrepresent her ethnicity."

One clue to her transformation comes from her time spent at nearly all-black Howard University, where she was apparently ostracized:

Dolezal's time at predominantly black Howard University may have been a major turning point in her transformation, her adopted brother said.

"When she applied they thought she was a black student," he said. "When she came there, they saw she was white and she wasn't treated that well, especially by people that worked there. She probably started developing this kind of dislike for being white and dislike for white people. She used to tell Izaiah ... that all white people are racists. She might have developed some self-hatred."

This goes beyond having low self esteem. This is pathological self-hatred, where it is so painful to accept who you are, that you feel the need to invent a personae of someone you aren't. Whatever the reason, Dolezal crossed a line years ago, claiming that you are who you think you are, objective reality be damned. So far, few on the left think she deserves punishment despite her claiming the status of victim who is deserving of compensation. That notion is a slippery slope with no bottom.