Yet, it never occurred to him, apparently, to ask anyone why the president of the United States, the most powerful man on the planet, told a crowd of mourning constituents that he knew what it felt like to “lose a home” due to a small kitchen fire in his Delaware home back in 2004 that nearly took the life of his microwave.

One might be tempted to blame the president’s mythologizing on his mental decline, but this is not new. Though most politicians idealize or romanticize their past, it is unlikely that there has ever been a bigger fabulist in presidential history than Biden. Let’s again recall that this is a person who, during a presidential campaign, felt comfortable appropriating a stranger’s hard-boiled, mine-digging, poetry-reading life in Wales. And Joe didn’t merely steal Neil Kinnock’s words, as reporter Maureen Dowd noted in 1987, he copied the story “with phrases, gestures and lyrical Welsh syntax intact.” One might call that sociopathic behavior.

Certainly, Biden’s mendaciousness is abnormal even by the low standards we typically use to judge politicians. I mean, it takes a spectacular shamelessness for a man who began his political career sucking up to segregationists — even lying about getting awards from George Wallace — to retroactively place himself repeatedly at the center of the civil rights movement. Still, you might be able to rationalize those lies. Biden has never held any political principles. He’s willing to take any position that helps him hold power. And he has. But there is something quite demented about a person inventing misfortune or using real heartbreak to make himself the center of a story. Joe Biden does this regularly.