Not all lies are the same. Some are utterly harmless, even comical, like those President Donald Trump tells about his golfing prowess, or the one he told about his Inauguration Day address: “I made a speech. I looked out. The field was — it looked like a million, a million and a half people.”

Other lies are different, though, because they come at the grievous expense of real people. Like, for example, the lie in which Joe Biden for years falsely and repeatedly blamed the death of his first wife and daughter in a car wreck on a truck driver, a living being and a citizen and a father, who Biden said “drank his lunch.”

The police report made clear that the truck driver in question hadn’t been drinking and wasn’t even at fault — that, in fact, Mrs. Biden “drove into the path” of the tractor-trailer.

But other than that, Scranton Joe’s oft-told tale of woe checks out. Honest.

“The driver of that truck,” wrote Kevin Williamson back in March, “went to his grave haunted by Biden’s lies, to the point where his children were forced to beg the vice president to stop defaming their late father. The casual cruelty with which Biden is willing to subordinate the lives of ordinary people to his political ambitions — for the sake of a petty tear-jerker line in one of his occasionally plagiarized stump speeches — is remarkable.”

Williamson calls Biden “a vicious, self-serving political hack … whose ambition leads him from time to time into shocking indecency.” This sounds about right.

Clearly, Biden’s truck-driver lie is a qualitatively different kind of tall tale than merely padding one’s crowd size on Inauguration Day. But if you’ve never heard about it, you’re not alone. The mainstream media doesn’t seem to think it’s newsworthy, even though it goes directly to Biden’s integrity, even his fundamental decency. The man has, throughout his nearly half-century political life, proven time and again that he’ll say just about anything to advance himself.

Joseph Robinette Biden’s first campaign for president, way back in 1988, imploded when he got caught plagiarizing speech material from Neil Kinnock, a British member of Parliament. Biden was trying to make himself appear more blue-collar and less blue-blood than the truth would allow. But he didn’t learn any lessons. As Valerie Richardson writes in The Washington Times, “Since the start of the 2020 campaign, Mr. Biden has been caught on numerous occasions spinning false and even ludicrous yarns, a tendency that has prompted head-scratching from his supporters and exasperation from conservatives stunned that his tall tales have yet to torpedo his salt-of-the-earth image.”

These yarns include relatively simple and straightforward ones, easily debunkable with today’s technology. But Biden sallies forth undeterred. There’s the lie, for example, that he told to South Carolina voters about him having attended a historically black college, Delaware State University. (There’s no record of him having attended the school.) And there’s the one about him having met with survivors of the Parkland school shooting when he was vice president. (The shooting happened more than a year after Biden was out of office.)

Perhaps most offensive to those Americans who’ve served in the military is a lie Biden has been telling about having headed into a combat zone in Afghanistan to pin a Silver Star medal on a gravely wounded Navy captain’s chest. “He said, ‘Sir, I don’t want the damn thing!’” Biden told a rapt audience. “‘Do not pin it on me, sir! Please, sir. Do not do that! He died. He died!’”

But, like a lot of events in the long life of this Mittyesque character called Joe Biden, it never happened.

More than 200 years ago, Thomas Jefferson uttered a truth that perfectly captures the falseness of the Democrat Party’s nominee for president: “He who permits himself to tell a lie once finds it much easier to do it a second and a third time, till at length it becomes habitual.”