Politicians have long had a reputation for being liars, but this rather generalized assertion points mainly to politicians’ propensity for making policy promises they fail to keep.

However, some politicians lie so much that, as the joke goes, you know they’re lying if you see their lips moving. Take Minnesota Governor and Democrat VP nominee Tim Walz, for example. He’s one of these latter types who lies not just about policy promises but about his own life story.

Walz’s latest lie typifies his long record of lying. He not only lied about the position of Donald Trump and his running mate, Senator JD Vance, on in vitro fertilization, but he went further, falsely claiming that “JD Vance opposing the miracle of IVF is a direct attack on my family and so many others.” He added, “If it was up to [Vance], I wouldn’t have a family because of IVF.”

In a fundraising letter in April, he was even more direct: “My wife and I used IVF to start a family.”

The trouble is, as Harris’s campaign has now admitted, Walz and his wife never used IVF to get pregnant. They used intrauterine insemination (IUI) to help them get pregnant. The difference between the two procedures is significant because IUI does not involve the creation and destruction of embryos.

The apparent reason for Walz’s lie is similar to the one motivating Joe Biden’s autobiographical whoppers: It is an attempt to personally identify with an issue in order to claim some emotionally connected experiential authority on it.

This is evident in how Walz set up his lie. “This gets personal for me and my family," he claimed, as he warned that Trump would restrict IVF access. "When my wife and I decided to have children, we spent years going through infertility treatments. And I remember praying every night for a call for good news. The pit in my stomach when the phone rang, and the agony when we heard that the treatments hadn’t worked. So this wasn’t by chance that when we welcomed my daughter into the world, we named her Hope.”

Walz hasn’t lied about this just once in some off-the-cuff remark; instead, he has repeated this lie on the campaign trail. Here’s another version: “Some of you may have heard this. This is personal for my wife and I. When Gwen and I decided to have children, we went through years of fertility treatments. The phone would ring, tenseness in my stomach, and then the agony when you heard the treatments hadn’t worked. So it wasn’t by chance that when we welcomed our first child, our beautiful daughter, we named her Hope.”

In another instance, he added emotion to his lie: “I remember it like it was yesterday. I’m not crying, you’re crying.”

What we are learning about Walz is that he is quite the BS artist. He designs his lies to play on the emotions of the crowd. He was doing the same thing when he lied about his military service record and engaged in stolen valor. He lied about his rank to promote his profile, and he did so to attack Americans’ fundamental Second Amendment right to bear arms — specifically, semiautomatic rifles with certain cosmetic features that he and every other leftist dub “weapons of war.”

When he lied about his arrest for driving drunk, it was to further his political career. And rather than fess up to his history, he hid it from his constituents, lying about his reason for getting arrested. He said it was due to hearing loss supposedly suffered during his military service, not intoxication.

Not only does Walz lie about his opponents’ policy positions, but he also lies about his own past in an effort to discredit Trump and Vance. Walz is demonstrating that he is a man not to be trusted. He will say nearly anything, including spinning blatant lies about his life, all to convince people to follow him. It is despicable.