Caine and Melnyk, both self-described Canadian liberals, started out to make a laudatory film about the documentarian’s documentarian. Instead, they found the real Michael Moore, who makes up facts where it pleases him, and assiduously avoids the types of interviews he demands of others.

Then there’s "Fahrenheit 9/11." It took a whole other documentary to set right the misleading statements in that film, and one document alone lists 59 deceits in the movie.

But do you know the story of Sgt. Peter Damon? The Iraq veteran lost both arms in a helicopter explosion, and appeared in Moore’s paean to Bush-hate without his knowledge. Damon was recuperating at Walter Reed when he was told “NBC Nightly News” wanted to interview him for a story about painkillers and recovery.

He consented, but the footage was later licensed to Michael Moore, who used it this way:

It's a powerful moment in Michael Moore's anti-war film Fahrenheit 9/11. A young American soldier who lost his arms in a helicopter explosion is describing his injuries. The soldier, Sergeant Peter Damon, says he feels like he is being "crushed in a vice". Painkillers, he continues, "take a lot of the edge off of it".

The scene follows a clip showing the Democratic congressman Jim McDermott criticising the Bush administration's conduct of the war in Iraq. "You know, they say they're not leaving any veterans behind, but they're leaving all kinds of veterans behind," the politician says.

"They took the clip because it was a gut-wrenching scene," Sgt. Damon later told the New York Post in an interview. "They sandwiched it in. [Moore] was using me as ammunition ... I was complaining about the pain I would've been having. I just want everybody to know what kind of a guy Michael Moore is, and what kind of film this is," he said.

Damon, who remains in favor of the Iraq war, never met Moore and didn’t even know he was in the film until a fellow Walter Reed patient who’d seen it addressed him with, “Hey, movie star.”

In 2006, Damon sued Moore for $85 million for using the interview without permission, “loss of reputation, emotional distress, embarrassment, and personal humiliation.” His lawyer claimed they had tried to come to an agreement with Moore for more than a year with no results.

As of June, Moore still takes no responsibility for his misrepresentation of Damon:

"Well, he filed it against NBC and the film company and everybody else was named because it was NBC that interviewed him. I didn't interview him. We just bought archival footage from NBC, so we got kind of dragged along into that," [Moore] said. "I don't know what else to say about that, other than I'm appreciative of his service to our country and I wish him well in his recovery."

Well, you could say “sorry.”

In this column, I’ve mentioned only two of Moore’s more obvious breaks with the truth. The sheer volume of his misstatements has spawned a cottage industry of fact-checkers.

When Moore critics, like myself, make mistakes, they usually correct the record and apologize. We all make mistakes. Moore has made a career of them.