A mailer used in South Carolina during the primaries trades on John’s anti-abortion stand, recently beefed up, and Cindy’s non-existent relationship with Mother Teresa. The image appears PhotoShopped, with Cindy walking and Mother Teresa standing. Note Cindy’s hair color back then. Also, the mailer claims Bridget was adopted in 1993, which contradicts all other McCain lore. Was that the year Cindy finally met Mother Teresa?

In a whopper rivaled only by Hillary Clinton’s Bosnia snipers and Mitt Romney’s dad marching with Martin Luther King, Jr., Cindy McCain was caught lying about Mother Teresa.

The legendary fable about how the McCains came to adopt their daughter Bridget from an orphanage in Bangladesh in 1991 held that Cindy was directed personally by Mother Teresa to take the little girl to America. Cindy was so moved by the nun that she marched home and handed the bundle to John McCain, saying, “Meet your daughter.”

The media ate the tale with a spoon and served it back to us.

A story earlier this year on ABC’s “Good Morning America” stated, “With Mother Teresa’s encouragement she brought her fourth child, Bridget, home.” An April 2008 Wall Street Journal profile states that Mother Teresa “implored” Cindy to bring the girls to the United States. Other articles say Cindy did it “at the behest” of Mother Teresa.

Ah, what a story! What a feat! What a woman!

What a bunch of hooey!

None other than the Christian Science Monitor has blown the lid off the Mother Teresa melodrama.

According to biographies of Mother Teresa, in 1991 she was in Mexico where she developed medical problems. From there, she went to a hospital in La Jolla, Calif.

A McCain source acknowledged that Cindy McCain did not meet Mother Teresa during the 1991 trip to Bangladesh but said McCain did meet her later on, although the source could not say when or where. The campaign has since reworded the reference to the adoption on its website.

Alexandra Marks, who wrote the Christian Science story, says that while most politicians and their peeps either gild the lily or have mental lapses, the important thing is evidence of patterns. As an example, she notes that Barack Obama claimed Kennedy funds financed the airlift that brought his father to study in America in 1959. In fact, the Kennedys didn’t contribute to that effort until 1960.

Obama’s mistake seemed to be an honest one, based on the lack of a pattern of distortion. Which brings us back to Cindy McCain.

Cindy McCain has repeatedly referred to herself as an “only child.” This week came news that she actually has two half sisters, although apparently she had very little contact with them.

But that’s not all.

McCain told the Chicago Tribune earlier this year that on one of her medical missions to Vietnam she was in “the very hospital – and in the very room – where her husband was brought after being shot down and then beaten by a mob during the war.”

A 1992 Washington Times story recounts a different version: “Mrs. McCain asked to see the operating room and her husband’s cell, but was turned down. She took the rejection philosophically. ‘It’s 27 years later. Let’s go on,’ Mrs. McCain said.”

Let’s all pause for a moment and conjure up an image in our minds of the news cycle that would result from Michelle Obama being caught lying about a relationship with Mother Teresa. Can you see the sputum flying from Bill O’Rilley’s livery lips? The gleeful braying from Rush Limbaugh? How FOX News would interrupt regular programming for back-to-back coverage of the unfolding crisis?

And yet, here we are again, with basically nothing being said about Cindy McCain’s flagrant fabrication of a non-existent yet supposedly life-changing encounter with Mother Teresa.

The McCain sins are being treated like those of George Bush and the members of his corrupt administration, which is to say, pre-emptively ignored. Journalists need to stop deciding in advance what we will and will not want to know about, and just report what’s out there, whether it helps or hurts those in power, or those who want to be. We need to take back the White House, but we need to take back the American press too.