Dishonesty? Delusion? At this point, does it even matter?

The centerpiece of Hillary Clinton's Bosnia tale is that she was the first presidential spouse since Eleanor Roosevelt to visit a war zone.

Problem is...it's not true.

It turns out that former First Lady Pat Nixon visited a Vietnamese war zone in 1969 -- a trip the Washington Post today describes as more dangerous than Clinton's "by almost any measure."

Clinton's "first since Roosevelt" story is not a new one. Here's the opening sentence of the Washington Post's 1996 article about her trip there:

First lady Hillary Rodham Clinton invoked the memory of Eleanor Roosevelt as she visited U.S. troops in Bosnia today.

Now that Clinton is under fire for her umpteenth falsehood about the Bosnia story, her campaign is responding by arguing that contemporaneous accounts did not mention Pat Nixon's trip.

As the WaPo's Michael Dobbs argues, this is absurd.

Just because something has appeared in a newspaper does not mean that is entirely accurate. The Clinton camp has circulated a March 26, 1996, quote from a Post article describing Clinton's Bosnia trip as "the first time since Roosevelt that a first lady has voyaged to a potential combat zone." The article went on to say that "other first ladies have visited troops abroad but never in front-line positions," citing the examples of Bush and Nixon.

How these factoids got into the Post story is unclear, but they offer a somewhat misleading picture of the relative risks being run by the three first ladies. By almost any measure, the Nixon trip to Saigon in July 1969 should surely count as the most dangerous of the three visits. Unlike Bosnia in March 1996 and Saudi Arabia in November 1990, South Vietnam was an actual, not "potential," war zone in the aftermath of the 1968 Tet offensive, according to retired Army Lt. Col. Gene Boyer, the Nixons' chief helicopter pilot.

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As a side note, Dobbs drops a very subtle hint in his article, which I will repeat:

How these factoids got into the Post story is unclear

Now recall how the 1996 WaPo article began -- the one that the Clinton team is now using to defend their boss.

First lady Hillary Rodham Clinton invoked the memory of Eleanor Roosevelt as she visited U.S. troops in Bosnia today.

To me, it looks like the source of the factoid was Clinton's team -- she was the one invoking the memory of Roosevelt, not the other way around.

Having worked as a communications director, I know that reporters often rely on press and policy staff for details like that.

Whatever the case, her story wasn't true then and it isn't true now. You'd hope that in twelve years, someone might mention that fact to her, but apparently, either no one knew the truth, or they didn't have the courage to tell her.

Either that or they just brazenly lied about the facts, figuring no one would challenge her claim. Even as immune as I've become to , I can't imagine they'd be that stupid, but you never know.

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Dobbs also throws in a little bonus, debunking HRC's false claim that her airplane took evasive action as it landed.

Speaking in a radio interview on the "Rusty Humphries Show," retired Air Force Col. William "Goose" Changose said that he did not undertake any kind of "evasive" maneuver on the approach to Tuzla, and that the only reason the descent was a little steeper than normal was because there were hills around.

"Not only were there no bullets flying around, there wasn't a bumblebee flying around," Changose recalled.

This story just gets more and more bizarre.

At this point, it's just creepy.