Tertullian,
De praescript. adv. haeret. 45:
I will not speak further about the Herodians, who claimed that Herod was Christ.
But why speak of later times? When the blood of Christ was but lately shed and the apostles were still in Judæa, the Lord's body was asserted to be a phantom; the Galatians had been led away to the observance of the law, and the Apostle was a second time in travail with them; the Corinthians did not believe the resurrection of the flesh, and he endeavoured by many arguments to bring them back to the right path. Then came Simon Magus and his disciple Menander. They asserted themselves to be powers of God. Then Basilides invented the most high god Abraxas and the three hundred and sixty-five manifestations of him. Then Nicolas, one of the seven Deacons, and one whose lechery knew no rest by night or day, indulged in his filthy dreams. I say nothing of the Jewish heretics who before the coming of Christ destroyed the law delivered to them: of Dositheus, the leader of the Samaritans who rejected the prophets: of the Sadducees who sprang from his root and denied even the resurrection of the flesh: of the Pharisees who separated themselves from the Jews on account of certain superfluous observances, and took their name from the fact of their dissent: of the Herodians who accepted Herod as the Christ. I come to those heretics who have mangled the Gospels, Saturninus, and the Ophites, the Cainites and Sethites, and Carpocrates, and Cerinthus, and his successor Ebion, and the other pests, the most of which broke out while the apostle John was still alive, and yet we do not read that any of these men were re-baptized.
https://www.newadvent.org/fathers/3005.htm
It is impossible that it was a late heresy, the equation Herod=Messiah.
A theological justification to identify Herod with the Jewish Messiah was the Shilo's prophecy Genesis 49:10:
"the sceptre will not depart from Judah... until Shiloh comes...".
Herod was the first Gentile to rule on the Jews exclusively with the title "King of Jews".
This says us why Jesus's invented biography was placed under Herod.