Ben Carson is a pathological liar who probably couldn’t pass a polygraph even if he was telling the truth. Carly Fiorina’s first speech at HP was a complete fabrication. Marco Rubio has issues with honesty and consistency. Chris Christie has seen God alone knows how many aides go to jail over BridgeGate. Jeb Bush denies having said nice things about Rubio, when it’s already out there. And Donald Trump denies referring to Marco Rubio as Mark Zuckerberg’s “personal senator” when the words are on Trump’s own website.

The one guy who’d managed to avoid the Big Fat Liar award was Ted Cruz. Not anymore.

Since he was a boy, Senator Ted Cruz has said, all he wanted to do was “fight for liberty” — a yearning that he says was first kindled when he heard his father’s tales of fighting as a rebel leader in Cuba in the 1950s, throwing firebombs, running guns and surviving torture.

Those stories, retold by Mr. Cruz and by his father, Rafael, have hooked Republican audiences and given emotional power to the message that the Texas senator is pushing as a contender for the party’s presidential nomination. In their telling, the father’s experience in Cuba — when the country was swept up by the charismatic young Fidel Castro, only to see him become a repressive Communist dictator — becomes a parable for the son’s nightmarish vision of government overreach under President Obama.

But the family narrative that has provided such inspirational fire to Mr. Cruz’s speeches, debate performances and a recently published memoir is, his father’s Cuban contemporaries say, an embroidered one.

This is appalling. Next thing you’re going to tell me, George Washington didn’t chop down the cherry tree, Abe Lincoln wasn’t born in a log cabin, and Bill Clinton actually did have sexual relations with that woman. Uh, wait, never mind about that last one. Whoops. 😉

Pro tip to GOP candidates: If you’re compelled to make up heroic stories about yourself, at least keep them vague enough that nobody can really contradict you.