As Joe Biden approaches his 80th birthday, he does so with an increasing inability to tell the truth.

More evidence of this came last week in Colorado, where he signed a decree to designate a former training site for the Army’s 10th Mountain Division as a national monument. During his remarks, Biden claimed that his deceased son Beau had “lost his life in Iraq.” But anyone who knows anything about Joe Biden knows this to be a lie, and a deliberate one.

The truth is that his son died of brain cancer in 2015, at Walter Reed Medical Center in Bethesda, Maryland, many years after he’d left Iraq. While there from 2008 to 2009, Beau Biden had served in the Judge Advocate General’s Corps of the Delaware Army National Guard. This was during the transition from the administration of George W. Bush to that of Barack Obama, and after most of the fighting in Iraq had subsided.

Still, Joe Biden felt it necessary to lie about his son’s life, felt it necessary to steal Gold Star status from the more than 4,400 American service personnel who died during our nation’s lengthy engagement in Iraq. (Biden has in the past blamed his son’s death on “exposure to burn pits” in Iraq, but he has exactly zero proof of that claim.)

“I say this as a father of a man who won the Bronze Star, the conspicuous service medal, and lost his life in Iraq,” said Biden in Colorado. “Imagine the courage, the daring, and the genuine sacrifice — genuine sacrifice they all made,” he said in an effort to marry his son’s rather uneventful service in the Delaware Guard to the storied heroism of the 10th Mountain Division during World War II.

For the record, we still believe that the most despicable lie Biden ever told was the one in which he repeatedly and falsely blamed the death of his first wife and daughter in a car wreck on a truck driver. This man, this trucker, was a citizen and a father. And Biden said he “drank his lunch.” The truth, according to the police report, was that the truck driver hadn’t been drinking and wasn’t even at fault — that, in fact, Mrs. Biden “drove into the path” of the tractor-trailer.

“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.”

How does our corrupt mainstream media live with itself? And how do its purveyors allow Biden to get away with this sort of thing?

“The media has long downplayed and softened President Biden’s decades-long history of falsehoods,” Fox News reports, “as most recently evidenced by a euphemism-filled New York Times report that referred to outright fabrications and lies as ‘folklore’ stories with ‘factual edges shaved off.’”

Go that? When Biden says his son died in Iraq, or that a drunk truck driver killed his wife and daughter, it’s just harmless “folklore.”

It’s impossible to cram Biden’s biggest whoppers into a standard paragraph, but here’s a sampler of the lies he’s told in an effort to claim identity in one constituent group or another: He said he was “appointed” to the U.S. Naval Academy. He said he was arrested in South Africa while trying to see Nelson Mandela. He said he was arrested during the Civil Rights movement of the 1960s. And he said he used to drive an 18-wheeler for a living. Lies, lies, and more lies.

More recently, while visiting Puerto Rico in the aftermath of Hurricane Ian, he said he was “sort of raised in the Puerto Rican community at home.” Whatever, dude. Who knew Corn Pop was part of a Puerto Rican gang?

Biden’s lies often take on the aura of a fish story, wherein the creature in question starts as a striped bass on the Delaware River and ends up as a great white shark just off Rehoboth Beach.

A case in point is when he declared last week that “everything was ruined” from the basement to the attic and “we almost lost a couple firefighters” when lightning struck his house 15 years ago. It might’ve been a frightening experience if it had actually happened that way, but of course it didn’t. As the Associated Press reported at the time, “no one was injured” in the “small fire that was contained to the kitchen” and under control within 20 minutes.

But, yeah, they “almost lost a couple of firefighters.” This guy makes Walter Mitty seem like Walter Cronkite.

If a Republican tried to massage or mutilate the truth half as much as Biden, there’d be 24-7 indignation from the media. And there was, of course. During Donald Trump’s four years in office, The Washington Post felt duty-bound to “fact-check” the daylights out of him and label his every utterance a lie rather than concede that so much of what we say is subject to varying interpretations.

During Biden’s first 20 months in office, there were 58 pieces published by PolitiFact to fact-check the president compared to a staggering 338 pieces designed to fact-check Biden critics, according to the Media Research Center’s NewsBusters.

When Trump was president, the fact-checkers were pouncing on his every statement, often labeling his tendentiousness as out-and-out lies. But with Biden, it’s crickets and tumbleweeds. As NewsBusters’ Tim Graham points out, “This dramatically imbalanced pattern of targeting explains why conservatives are hostile to ‘fact checkers,’ not to facts.”

Indeed, “Trump’s false or misleading claims total 30,573 over 4 years,” blared the laughable Washington Post headline four days after Trump left office.

But when their guy Biden repeatedly lies through his teeth, “It’s silence of the lambs,” as Fox News media critic Joe Concha quips.

“He constantly lies with impunity and for no apparent reason,” Concha continues. “He said he finished at the top of his law school class. He finished near the bottom. He had to drop out of the 1988 presidential race due to plagiarism. He keeps saying he was arrested during civil rights protests. He said he was arrested trying to see Nelson Mandela. He insists inflation is at or near zero percent. He says we’re not in a recession. And he says the border is closed. Yet, fact-checkers either ignore the lies or try to defend them.”

It’s true that Trump rarely let circumstances get in the way of his agenda, but the supposed “lies” he told tended to be exaggerations in service of a deeper truth, such as the enthusiasm of his supporters or the popularity of his policies. This doesn’t excuse Trump, but Biden’s lies are often cut out of whole cloth, and they’re told to make him seem smarter, stronger, braver, more virtuous, or more worthy of support or sympathy.

“There is no vice so mean, so pitiful, so contemptible,” wrote Thomas Jefferson nearly 240 years ago, “and 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.”

How right Jefferson was.