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Mitt Romney will stop at nothing to score political points.  Even if it means lying outright about his father.

I saw my father march with Martin Luther King.

Uh huh.

He made a similar statement Sunday during an appearance on NBC’s “Meet the Press.” He said, “You can see what I believed and what my family believed by looking at our lives. My dad marched with Martin Luther King. My mom was a tireless crusader for civil rights.”

Right.  Got it — dad marched with MLK.  Even David Broder says so, and supplies some corroborative detail intended to give artistic verisimilitude to an otherwise bald and unconvincing narrative.  (BMG bonus points for identifying the source of that phrase!)

As Mitt Romney recalled in his address, his father was able to remind people that he had marched with Martin Luther King Jr. (through upscale Grosse Pointe, Mich., in support of open-housing legislation).

Problem is, it’s not true.  None of it.  As the Phoenix’s David Bernstein reveals (see also update here) in some superb digging, George Romney never marched “with” — i.e., in the presence of, at the same place at the same time — Martin Luther King, Jr.

[..]

Faced with the unfortunate reality that Mitt was making things up, his campaign has retreated into a hilarious Humpty-Dumptyism about what it means to “march with” someone.  You see, it doesn’t mean that you were actually there.  It means that, well, you participated in a march about a related topic on a different day, and maybe you thought about the guy while you were doing it.

Mitt, in other words, was “speaking figuratively, not literally.”

I am not making this up.  Apparently, it’s all about what the meaning of “with” is.  Can you believe that, after Bill Clinton’s debacle over the meaning of the word “is,” another political figure would try something like that?