View Criteria

I'm attempting to create a view of things sorted by date without actually displaying the date field in the view.

I have attempted to add the deluge "sort by USER_DATE" into the view criteria, but it wont accept this.
I have looked the the functionality-based urls, and do not see an option to specify sort criteria.
I resorted to building am html view and constricting the table "by hand", which is less than optimal since all the filters are not automatically present.

How can this be done?