Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz has surely benefited from his portrayal as the country’s “football dad.” But he wouldn’t have passed the truth test in my father’s household, where lying was ranked as the highest punishable offense.

I’m not saying that Walz lies, precisely. But he tends to gild his résumé for political gain. He’s hardly the first to do this.

Take his 1995 arrest for drunken and reckless driving. Walz, then a 31-year-old high school teacher, was clocked at 96 mph in a 55-mph zone in Nebraska. He was pulled over by a state trooper, who, upon smelling alcohol, asked Walz to take a field sobriety test, which he failed. Walz then submitted to a hospital for a blood test, which revealed his blood alcohol level to be 0.128, well above the state’s legal limit.

All this information is recorded in police records, yet during Walz’s 2006 congressional campaign, the press was told that he hadn’t been drinking, that he drove himself to the police station and that the reason he failed his field sobriety test was because of a misunderstanding related to hearing loss from his time in the National Guard artillery unit.

In 2018, when Walz was running for governor of Minnesota, he came clean and admitted to drinking and driving. Telling the truth eventually is better than never at all, I suppose — and Walz now refers to his incarceration that night as life-changing. Today, his go-to beverage is Diet Mountain Dew. But Walz’s prevarications didn’t stop there.

Now, admittedly, there’s lying and then there’s LYING. When Walz said he and his wife wouldn’t have their two children if not for in vitro fertilization, he was pointing to his Republican opponent, Sen. JD Vance, whom Walz accused of wanting to eliminate IVF as a fertility option. But the Walzes did not, in fact, use IVF, according to his wife, Gwen Walz, who clarified the record in a statement. The couple went another less-expensive, less-invasive route — intrauterine insemination — which is also less ethically challenging because, unlike with IVF, no embryos are created outside the womb.

This might seem a small deviation from the truth if Walz hadn’t been using the anecdote to attack Vance on a false premise. Both Vance and former president Donald Trump are on record as supporting IVF.

It’s almost certain that Walz won’t be giving any “big solo interviews” because, according to Politico, he “might not have a full command of where Harris is on every issue.” This is certainly understandable, as Harris has changed her positions on several issues since Democrats made her the emergency presidential nominee five weeks ago.

Harris seems to prefer that she and Walz grant only joint interviews, which, as Politico said, “tend to be softer and focus more on the relationships between the two candidates.” No tough questions, in other words. Morning show softballs may give comfort to the ill-prepared, but they deny viewers the content they need to be better-informed voters. Nothing about the pair’s first (taped) interview Thursday night, with CNN’s Dana Bash, satisfied that imperative. Although Harris was relatively well-spoken, Walz seemed to be a mixed-up mess.

He answered none of the four questions he was asked, including whether he had misspoken when he said he had carried a gun “in war” when he never was deployed. A simple “yes” might have sufficed, but instead he sputtered evasive nonsense and, to be rhetorically accurate, gobbledygook.

Walz’s Midwestern charm and “tonic masculinity,” to quote a Post colleague, might work for state politics and political rallies, but voters don’t need their tires changed — or a new gutter. They need to feel confident that Walz can capably step into the presidency if need be.

There’s no reason to believe Harris picked Walz because of his avuncular antics or his image as a great father, the latter of which should be assumed as normal, not celebrated as something rare.

As Harris’s repackaging team tweaked her record to make her seem like a moderate, she studiously selected as her running mate the country’s most liberal governor — a man who just happens to fudge reality, exaggerate his accomplishments and invent half-truths to burnish his résumé.

And to think, the Democratic Party’s big pitch in Chicago was character.

Kathleen Parker’s email address is kathleenparker@washpost.com.