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Joel Mowbray has the scoop on John Kerry’s fable about meeting with United Nations ambassadors before the October 2002 vote to authorize the use of force in Iraq:

U.N. ambassadors from several nations are disputing assertions by Democratic presidential candidate Sen. John Kerry that he met for hours with all members of the U.N. Security Council just a week before voting in October 2002 to authorize the use of force in Iraq.

An investigation by The Washington Times reveals that while the candidate did talk for an unspecified period to at least a few members of the panel, no such meeting, as described by Mr. Kerry on a number of occasions over the past year, ever occurred.

At the second presidential debate earlier this month, Mr. Kerry said he was more attuned to international concerns on Iraq than President Bush, citing his meeting with the entire Security Council.

“This president hasn’t listened. I went to meet with the members of the Security Council in the week before we voted. I went to New York. I talked to all of them, to find out how serious they were about really holding Saddam Hussein accountable,” Mr. Kerry said of the Iraqi dictator.

Speaking before the Council on Foreign Relations in New York in December 2003, Mr. Kerry explained that he understood the “real readiness” of the United Nations to “take this seriously” because he met “with the entire Security Council, and we spent a couple of hours talking about what they saw as the path to a united front in order to be able to deal with Saddam Hussein.”

But of the five ambassadors on the Security Council in 2002 who were reached directly for comment, four said they had never met Mr. Kerry. The four also said that no one who worked for their countries’ U.N. missions had met with Mr. Kerry either…

So, will Lost It O’Donnell be screaming “LIAR! CREEPY LIAR!” 46 times tomorrow night on MSNBC? Stay tuned.

Update: Red State says Mowbray will be blogging on the story here.

Update II: Spoons has a good round-up of blogger reaction. I concur with fellow bloggers that the advance hype in the blogosphere was unwise. Why? “Lesson No. 1: Manage expectations,” my college public policy professor always counseled. One of the few valuable things I ever learned at Oberlin.

That said, I don’t agree with critics of the story who sniff that there’s “nothing new” in exposing Kerry’s lies and that therefore the story is a dud.

Like Zell Miller says: “I will never trust John Kerry with my family’s safety.” The U.N. story just strengthens this security mom’s distrust all the more. I concur with N.Z Bear:

I’ll admit, my first reaction was a bit of a yawn myself. But then I thought about why that was, and I think it comes down to the fact that I expect Kerry to exaggerate and outright lie when it serves his political purpose of the moment. But the fact that he’s a serial exaggerator is exactly why this story should receive attention, not why it should be shrugged off.

Coupled with Joshua Muravchik’s devastating report last week on the Kerry campaign’s continuing lies about his secret meeting with Commies in Paris (and the media’s complicity in perpetuating them), Mowbray’s story helps connect the dots of Kerry’s self-serving foreign policy deceptions from Vietnam to the War on Terror. Kerry boasts a 30-year record not of experience, but of expedience–always at America’s expense.

Update III: Red State has a follow-up, laying out the lies in detail and explaining why it matters.