Oh my God. This one is difficult to believe.

A disturbing portrait is rapidly emerging of Paul Ryan as a habitual liar.

We all saw the fact checkers pull their hair out after Ryan’s mendacious acceptance speech in Tampa. Now the multiplying lies also apply to his personal story, with the young candidate  highlighting his virility by claiming he had run an impressive marathon time of less than three hours. But Runner’s World has the ugly and painful truth:

It turns out Paul Ryan has not run a marathon in less than three hours—or even less than four hours.

A spokesman confirmed late Friday that the Republican vice presidential candidate has run one marathon. That was the 1990 Grandma’s Marathon in Duluth, Minnesota, where Ryan, then 20, is listed as having finished in 4 hours, 1 minute, and 25 seconds.

Ryan had said in a radio interview last week that his personal best was “Under three, high twos. I had a two hour and fifty-something.”

Ouch.

This inability to tell the truth is particualrly disturbing because Ryan is known as a numbers guy and has promised that he doesn’t want to eliminate Medicare. But can his word be trusted? As the fabrications and fibs mount, it is increasingly difficult to decipher fact from fiction when the Vice Presidential nominee speaks.

The VP’s veracity matters because anyone can look good — or even presidential — if they simply make stuff up. You know, maybe I should run for president in 2016 and present myself as a decorated a Iraq War veteran — even though I never fought in the desert. Or, perhaps, I’ll upgrade my bachelors degree into a PhD from Harvard. And why not increase my net worth a few million dollars to highlight my business acumen running companies I never actually owned.

No one knows who Mitt Romney is (including Mr. Romney himself). But we are beginning to wonder who the real Paul Ryan is as well? His actual life is increasingly not conforming to the storyline he is selling us.

This blatant marathon lie will be difficult to run away from — particularly when you jog as slow as we now know Ryan does.