None of this makes sense, and you don’t have to be a raving partisan to recognize it. More than a handful of Democrats with sufficient regard for their own integrity have said as much.

Joe Biden’s diagnosis with an “aggressive” form of prostate cancer — which the former president said in a statement was discovered only last Friday — was highly unlikely to have been discovered only last week. “He did not develop it in the last 100, 200 days,” said Dr. Zeke Emanuel, a former adviser in the Obama administration. “He had it while he was president. He probably had it at the start of his presidency, in 2021.” Urologist Dr. David Shusterman agrees. “The fact that we just find it at a Gleason nine is just pretty much unheard of in this day and age of medicine,” he said of the curious extent of Biden’s cancer’s metastasis. Rather, the president’s condition is what a physician might encounter when treating “a patient” who “hasn’t had medical attention in 10 years.”

But the president was receiving regular checkups, and he was earning — we were told — clean bills of health. Even accounting for misdiagnoses, false negatives, and the simple fact that the doctors who care for prominent people must often weigh the value of ordering extensive tests that can be burdensome against prudence, the facts of Biden’s diagnosis are odd. Rather than acknowledge the good faith in the public’s confusion, Biden’s handlers and allies have again defaulted to insisting that their critics and skeptics are maniacal liars.

An NBC News item citing doctors who supposedly maintain that Biden’s diagnosis “is unusual but not unheard of” doesn’t live up to its own hype. As the American Cancer Society’s chief scientific officer confessed, “We definitely would anticipate that he has had prostate cancer for many, many years.” But in about 8 percent of such cases — 8 percent — a prostate cancer like Biden’s can metastasize prior to discovery. “Many doctors do not screen men in their late 70s or 80s, since those individuals are likely to die of another medical condition before they die of prostate cancer,” the dispatch added. Well, that’s ghoulish, but it doesn’t apply to the president of the United States. So, what was the point of this piece and its dismissive headline?

I’ll hazard a guess: The point was to reinforce the emerging Democratic talking point that anyone who questions the Biden family’s integrity is nuts. That’s what House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries insisted when he attacked the GOP for “peddling conspiracy theories” about Biden’s diagnosis. That was the Daily Beast’s strategy when they assembled all the least credible of the former president’s reliable critics to indict the MAGA movement, which had turned “Biden’s cancer into another conspiracy.” New York magazine, BuzzFeed, and Rolling Stone all rounded up the best “conspiratorial” reactions from the MAGA right, each of which is supposedly illustrative of their pathological paranoia and, of course, Democrats’ superior judgment.

They have no right to their self-satisfaction. Joe Biden and his family deserve our sympathy, but not the benefit of the doubt. It is only judicious to observe circumspection when evaluating even superficially truthful claims promulgated by Biden and his handlers, particularly given the degree to which they have proven that their willingness to mislead the public is a reflex.

We remember how Robert Hur — who has been wholly vindicated in his excessively gentle assessment of Biden’s decrepitude — had his character assassinated by people who knew that his assessment was accurate. We remember what became of the stutter, the shuffle, and the “cheap fakes” — what amounted to an unbelievably haughty demand that Americans discount the evidence of their own eyes in favor of the Democratic Party’s preferred political narrative.

Indeed, given the comfort Biden’s allies showed when lying to the public throughout the last presidency, the president’s phalanx has forfeited the presumption of innocence on which they now rely.

“Prices have been essentially flat in our country these last two months,” said Karine Jean-Pierre in the wake of one Consumer Price Index survey that found food, energy, shelter, and medical care costs rising. “The border is secure,” Kamala Harris said after a month in which CBP contacts at the border increased by 1.7 percent from the previous month, which represented a 22 percent increase from the year prior. When confronted with the public record of his on-camera insistence that claims relating to Biden’s ailing condition were “right-wing propaganda,” Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer had the nerve to insist that he simply “didn’t” call into question speculation about the president’s obvious condition.

Joe Biden himself is an inveterate fibber — a teller of “tall tales,” in the New York Times’ estimation, as though his dishonesty was an adorable peculiarity. He could not help himself, and his blatant falsity put his defenders in the awful position of having to pretend as though they were easily gulled. That’s why we were all forced to watch reporters look one another in the eye and mourn the degree to which they were misled by the White House’s supremely adroit coverup of the president’s health issues — a performance for the benefit of no one other than their fellow reporters. Why should the public trust their perceptions when they’ve demonstrated less empirical facility than the average adult?

It is the inveterate liar’s habit to retreat into more lies when confronted with their mendacity. Perhaps we shouldn’t expect anything less from Joe Biden’s few remaining defenders. There is no honor in defending the indefensible, and the former president long ago demonstrated that he is not worth the sacrifice.