The Attorney General of Connecticut, Richard Blumenthal, is running to be the next Democratic Senator of Connecticut; he is also, as revealed by the New York Times last night, a liar:

At a ceremony honoring veterans and senior citizens who sent presents to soldiers overseas, Attorney General Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut rose and spoke of an earlier time in his life.

“We have learned something important since the days that I served in Vietnam,” Mr. Blumenthal said to the group gathered in Norwalk in March 2008. “And you exemplify it. Whatever we think about the war, whatever we call it — Afghanistan or Iraq — we owe our military men and women unconditional support.”

There was one problem: Mr. Blumenthal, a Democrat now running for the United States Senate, never served in Vietnam. He obtained at least five military deferments from 1965 to 1970 and took repeated steps that enabled him to avoid going to war, according to records.

The deferments allowed Mr. Blumenthal to complete his studies at Harvard; pursue a graduate fellowship in England; serve as a special assistant to The Washington Post’s publisher, Katharine Graham; and ultimately take a job in the Nixon White House.

In 1970, with his last deferment in jeopardy, he landed a coveted spot in the Marine Reserve, which virtually guaranteed that he would not be sent to Vietnam. He joined a unit in Washington that conducted drills and other exercises and focused on local projects, like fixing a campground and organizing a Toys for Tots drive.

Yeah. Pretty damning stuff. There are many things you can recover from in politics, but I think it's still exceptionally difficult to recover from making up military experience. Blumenthal has told the Times he misspoke, basically, that he got swept up and sometimes said "we" when he should have said "them," but this is going to be a pretty hard sell.

What I'm very interested in, though, is why Blumenthal thought he could lie -- or mispeak, or exaggerate, whatever -- in the first place? He had to know the truth would come out, didn't he? The longer this went on, the more likely it was to damage him -- and this, the revelation on the eve of the primary, has to be about the worst case scenario for that revelation.

The answer for why Blumenthal thought he could get away with this also appears in the Times article:

In at least eight newspaper articles published in Connecticut from 2003 to 2009, he is described as having served in Vietnam.

The New Haven Register on July 20, 2006, described him as “a veteran of the Vietnam War,” and on April 6, 2007, said that the attorney general had “served in the Marines in Vietnam.” On May 26, 2009, The Connecticut Post, a Bridgeport newspaper that is the state’s third-largest daily, described Mr. Blumenthal as “a Vietnam veteran.” The Shelton Weekly reported on May 23, 2008, that Mr. Blumenthal “was met with applause when he spoke about his experience as a Marine sergeant in Vietnam.”

And the idea that he served in Vietnam has become such an accepted part of his public biography that when a national outlet, Slate magazine, produced a profile of Mr. Blumenthal in 2000, it said he had “enlisted in the Marines rather than duck the Vietnam draft.”

That Slate story is here, though Slate has already corrected it. It's at the root of why Blumenthal thought he could say this stuff and get away with it -- it's a quick trip through a construction of a politician's life. It must have felt, to the reporter writing it up, that he was getting the full story. I bet there were multiple sources for the biography -- the candidate's Web site, for instance, and the candidate's chief of staff, and then the candidate himself. A phone call or two would have cleared this up in 2000; instead, ten years later, it takes The New York Times getting interested in Blumenthal's national chances for the truth to come to light.

Connecticut Attorney General and Senate hopeful Richard Blumenthal never served in Vietnam, the New York Times reported yesterday, though he'd claimed so for years. (Slate's David Plotz was snookered, too, referring to Blumenthal's military service in a 2000 "Assessment" of the pol.) Over e-mail, Slate staffers considered why Blumenthal might have done it and what the fallout will be.

That's the intro paragraph from a piece discussing Blumenthal at Slate today. Here's the thing -- Plotz didn't get snookered; once that story was printed, he was actively part of snookering the rest of us, those of us that read and depend upon magazines and newspapers to provide not just repetitions of a candidate's playbook but also actual reporting. We expect fact-checking. Sometimes -- most of the time -- that means checking the things that seem self-evident. Politicians lie; sources lie; people, as a whole teeming mass, lie. That's why you're supposed to keep digging.