Given that the man is a US politician, achieving meme status for lying is actually super impressive.

Prior to Santos, I'd have just kinda said it was a job requirement, especially on the GOP side.  They've always been big fans of doing shiat like showing Bush in his flight suit to imply he was a military veteran who'd at least been willing to volunteer for potential combat service at some point.

// Bush was, in fact, a member of the Texas Air National Guard, which is a completely legitimate and respectable job to have, obviously.  That his buddy Rove presented it as entirely something else was actually a minor scandal at the time, but even then it was kind of an eye-roll "politicians, man, what's to be done about the politicians" thing than a serious hiat to his reputation.  I picked this example out of the infinity plus one available examples of this kind of shiat just because it's exactly the same thing Santos became a meme over, falsifying his CV.