When she told her tall tale on television in the beautifully crafted performance that TV Guide rightly honored, she did it with a virtuosa's mastery of every nuance, displaying a range of emotions that would have made Bette Davis look one-dimensional. It wasn't just what she said that impressed but the stage setting, the costuming (the ladylike pinkish suit, the perfect hair), the delicate pose, just the right sight lines with the Lincoln portrait in the background, the tonal modulation that no American politician would master until eloquent young Barack Obama came alongŠ.

Talk about a tour de force, when her presentation was over, you had to keep from standing up and yelling not only Author! Author! but Designer! Designer! What a show that was. Not since Loretta Young and her twirling petticoats has innocence been so perfectly depicted.

Maybe too perfectly. Only when the magic began to wear off, which didn't take long for anybody who'd followed her career in low finance, did it occur that Hillary Clinton's superb memory was matched only by her superber forgettery, in this case about just who had arranged her profits in the futures market.

You'd think, just out of sheer gratitude, the lady (in question) might have thrown in a good word for Robert L. "Red" Bone, who knew how to play games with the market as well as anybody in the business. (He was once suspended from trading for three years, and his firm fined $250,000, for it.) But giving ol' Red any credit might have spoiled the effect.

Now it's landing under fire at Tuzla a la John Wayne. What an exciting life Miss Hillary lives, at least in her own mind. As if her real life saga weren't dramatic enough. Which may be the most puzzling thing about both Clintons' tendency to, uh, exaggerate. There's no reason to. It's almost as if it were a compulsion. And talk about the audacity of hope, they act as nobody's ever going to question their stories, or just google Hillary Clinton, Tuzla, 1996.

"What is truly amazing," a friend e-mails, "is that these Ivy League-educated, smart people don't seem to think anyone else has enough smarts to go back and check whether or not these statements are true. In this day and age of Google, where virtually anyone can check virtually anything, as well as more archives by news organizations, what is truly surprising here is their underestimation of other people's intelligence. Maybe this is a typical character flaw of those who feel like they are smarter than everyone else."

Maybe, or maybe the Clintons' melodramatic flair is just an overblown case of the human propensity to star in our own drama, complete with heroic if fictive details. Or maybe it has to do with being a politician and having to do a little self-promotion every election. Call it an occupational hazard.

The Clinton Syndrome is scarcely limited to the Clintons - or to Ivy Leaguers or smart people. Maybe false memory isn't part of just the Clinton condition but the human condition. And we can all learn something from seeing it in deceptive action. This latest episode should say something cautionary about our own erring selves - especially to us more dramatic types, the sort of misfits drawn to journalism and other forms of storytelling.