Let me put it this way: when you have an Ego that great, the worst thing you can aditionally have is just enough intelligence to be perfectly aware of your shortcomings.
When you're too smart, your skills cement how great you are: how you project yourself is how you actually feel ("I know I'm awesome, and so does everybody else"). On the other hand, if you're too dumb to realize how incompetent you are, your Ego keeps chuging along just fine as well. You might not be great, but you don't know it, and you feel great ("Wow, people call me dumb, but they do everything wrong, so they're the dumb ones. I'm [drool falls on the floor] awesome!"). So once again, what you project is how you actually feel about yourself.
And then, there's Pat, riiiight in that awful middle point. You know you're not the smartest. You know you're not the fittest. But your EGO has told you your whole life that you SHOULD be the smartest! The fittest! Damn it! How could you not be, Mama Raven always said you're her special boy... This internal conflict exists within you, non-stop, 24/7, barely contained... but you're still able to funcion, just as long as that feeling of inadequacy is never allowed to emerge to the outside world. Here, in "Pat's Incredibly Average World of Mediocrity", what you project is how you need to feel about yourself ("Please, please please tell me I am awesome!").
And when - inevitably - the feeble balance of your ilusion is broken, that's when the Ego ("The Monster", perhaps?) takes over. And it goes into full overdrive mode. Monkey-in-the cage-slinging-shit-on-the-walls mode. Poor-man-bankrupting-himself-for-internet-points mode. That's the situation when an apparently logical man starts making THE DUMBEST decisions he could possibly make.
TL,DR: Pat knows he should've let it go a loong time ago, and he knows he's fucked. We heard him admit it when he thought there were no enemies around (Josiah tapes). But the Ego just won't let him publicly acknowledge that. Ever. To save face, he'll always take things to the extreme, because if he doesn't, the consequence is he will have to finally accept his many many failures, in front of his entire audience. In a way, he's already enjoying his own prison, stalker.
