HAT IS THE WORST LIE a president can tell?

"I did not have sexual relations with that woman, Miss Lewinsky."

Or ...

"He has weapons of mass destruction -- the world's deadliest weapons -- which pose a direct threat to the United States, our citizens and our friends and allies."

One of those lies got a president impeached. The other lie not only got the liar who told it the war he wanted, but also resulted in huge business deals for his friends and virtually assures him a landslide victory in the next election.

Sure, we've been lied to before. Lots of lies: big lies, little lies, lies that brought us down in the eyes of the world. "I am not a crook" was a lie, and it sent Richard Nixon packing. "Read my lips: No new taxes" wasn't so much a lie as a broken promise, but it nonetheless cost the first Bush his presidency. "Ketchup is a vegetable" was technically not a lie, but it was a good example of the Reagan administration's whacked view of the world.

As the lies that led us into the Iraq War started to unravel and be exposed, the Bush administration went into survival mode with their only defensive maneuver: Keep repeating the lie over and over and over again until the American people are so worn down they'll scream "uncle!" and start believing it.

But nothing can hide this indisputable fact: There is no worse lie than one told to scare mothers and fathers enough to send their children off to fight a war that did not need to be fought because there never was any real threat at all. To falsely tell a nation's citizens that their lives are in jeopardy just so you can settle your own personal score ("He tried to kill my daddy!") or to make your rich friends even richer, well, in a more just world, there would be a special prison cell in Joliet reserved for that type of liar.

George W. Bush has turned the White House into the Home of the Whopper, telling one lie after another, all in pursuit of getting his dirty little war. It worked.

His whoppers are available in all shapes and sizes and configurations. Allow me to present to you the tasty menu the Whopper-in-Chief served up special just for you. I'll call them "The Iraq War Combo Meals":

O. 1 THE ORIGINAL WHOPPER: "Iraq has nuclear weapons!"

There is no greater way to scare a population than to say there is a madman on the loose and he has (or is building) nuclear weapons. Nuclear weapons he intends to use on you.

George W. Bush laid the groundwork for scaring us silly early on. In his speech to the United Nations in September 2002, Bush said with a straight face that "Saddam Hussein has defied all these efforts and continues to develop weapons of mass destruction. The first time we may be completely certain he has a nuclear weapons [sic] is when, God forbid, he uses one."

Soon after, on October 7, Bush told a crowd in Cincinnati, "If the Iraqi regime is able to produce, buy or steal an amount of highly enriched uranium a little larger than a single softball, it could have a nuclear weapon in less than a year. ... Facing clear evidence of peril, we cannot wait for the final proof -- the smoking gun -- that could come in the form of a mushroom cloud." How to sway the American public from its initial reluctance to go to war with Iraq? Just say "mushroom cloud" and -- BOOM! -- watch those poll numbers turn around!

In addition to uranium from Africa, Bush said the Iraqis had "attempted to purchase high-strength aluminum tubes and other equipment needed for gas centrifuges, which are used to enrich uranium for nuclear weapons."

Frightening stuff. Imagine how much more frightening if it was actually true. Joseph Wilson, a senior American diplomat with more than 20 years of experience, including positions in Africa and Iraq, was sent to Niger in 2002 on a CIA-directed mission to investigate the British claims that Iraq had tried to buy "yellowcake uranium" from Niger. He concluded that the allegations were false.

The White House ignored Wilson's report and instead kept the hoax alive. When the administration persisted with the fabricated story, one official, according to the New York Times, said, "People winced and thought, why are you repeating this trash?" The documents from Niger were so badly faked that the Niger foreign minister who "signed" one of them was no longer in the government -- in fact, he had been, unbeknownst to the British or American liars who made up the story, out of office for more than a decade.

The aluminum tubes "discovery" also turned out to be a fictitious threat. On January 27, 2003 -- the day before Bush's State of the Union address -- the head of the International Atomic Energy Agency, Mohamed El-Baradei, told the U.N. Security Council that two months of inspections in Iraq had produced no evidence of prohibited activities at former Iraqi nuclear sites. In addition, El- Baradei said, the aluminum tubes "unless modified, would not be suitable for manufacturing centrifuges."

According to reports in the Washington Post, Newsweek, and other publications, the assertion that the tubes could be used for nuclear weapons production had already been questioned by U.S. and British intelligence officials. U.N. inspectors said they had found proof that Iraq planned to use the tubes to build small rockets, not nuclear weapons. And the Iraqis were not trying to buy the equipment in secret -- their purchase order was accessible on the Internet. But Mr. Bush didn't let facts stand in the way of his tough-talking State of the Union address to almost 62 million viewers on January 28, 2003: "... Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa," he stated. "Imagine those nineteen hijackers with other weapons and other plans -- this time armed by Saddam Hussein. It would take one vial, one canister, one crate slipped into this country to bring a day of horror like none we have ever known. We will do everything in our power to make sure that that day never comes."

On March 16, Co-President Dick Cheney appeared on "Meet the Press" and told the nation that Hussein has "been absolutely devoted to trying to acquire nuclear weapons. And we believe he has, in fact, reconstituted nuclear weapons."

Three days later, we went to war.

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