Powerline points us to the much-hyped story of the weekend, a Washington Times piece by National Review's State Department correspondent, Joel Mowbray:

U.N. ambassadors from several nations are disputing assertions by Democratic presidential candidate Sen. John Kerry that he met for hours with all members of the U.N. Security Council just a week before voting in October 2002 to authorize the use of force in Iraq.

An investigation by The Washington Times reveals that while the candidate did talk for an unspecified period to at least a few members of the panel, no such meeting, as described by Mr. Kerry on a number of occasions over the past year, ever occurred.

This contradicts Kerry's assertion at the second presidential debate that he had such a meeting:

This president hasn't listened. I went to meet with the members of the Security Council in the week before we voted. I went to New York. I talked to all of them, to find out how serious they were about really holding Saddam Hussein accountable.

Kerry was even more emphatic in one of his big prepared foreign policy speeches:

Speaking before the Council on Foreign Relations in New York in December 2003, Mr. Kerry explained that he understood the "real readiness" of the United Nations to "take this seriously" because he met "with the entire Security Council, and we spent a couple of hours talking about what they saw as the path to a united front in order to be able to deal with Saddam Hussein."

Kerry is now backing down:

When reached for comment last week, an official with the Kerry campaign stood by the candidate's previous claims that he had met with the entire Security Council.

But after being told late yesterday of the results of The Times investigation, the Kerry campaign issued a statement that read in part, "It was a closed meeting and a private discussion."

A Kerry aide refused to identify who participated in the meeting.

The statement did not repeat Mr. Kerry's claims of a lengthy meeting with the entire 15-member Security Council, instead saying the candidate "met with a group of representatives of countries sitting on the Security Council."

Asked whether the international body had any records of Mr. Kerry sitting down with the whole council, a U.N. spokesman said that "our office does not have any record of this meeting."

Great work by the bloggers who got this story rolling and by Mowbray for putting it all together. What does it all mean? This is a lot bigger deal, at a minimum, than Dick Cheney forgetting that he'd ever run into John Edwards; the problem with some of Kerry's fabrications is that they tend to be complicated, self-important embellishments that are hard to square with a simple trick of memory. That's how Roger Simon, who compares this to the "Christmas in Cambodia" fairytale, views the story. Jason Steffens is less impressed with the electoral significance of yet another "Kerry made stuff up" story, as apparently are some of Simon's readers.

I doubt myself that this will be a game-breaker, but then, anything that puts Kerry on the defensive for even a day at this late stage can be a big momentum-suck, and this is a legitimate question, and one that Kerry would have to answer if we had a press corps that demanded answers from Kerry, which it often has not. Of course, the ultimate test is whether other news agencies will pick up this story - as they would if it were a claim that Bush had lied and ran on CBS or ABC or in the New York Times - or if this will get buried in the right-wing media ghetto. This morning's Drudge Report is not encouraging: there's a small headline, totally eclipsed by the blaring coverage of Bill Clinton's triumphant, press-oxygen-sucking return to the campaign. We know which story Big Media would rather cover; Matt Lauer last week was worshipfully comparing a Clinton return to Willis Reed hobbling onto the court in the 1970 NBA Finals (which is a humorous analogy because it puts Kerry in the Clyde Frazier role). Stay tuned.

UPDATE: INDC Journal has more, including links to other commentary. Bill also considers a possible justification:

A commenter brings up a reasonable point - Kerry "meant to communicate" that he only met with the permanent members of the Security Council, not "all of them," as he specified on two occasions. I don't believe that this interpretation completely invalidates the significance of Kerry's statements, but in any case, I've been told that verification regarding the permanent five is in the works. We'll see. I await further detail with everyone else.

Captain Ed finds this unhelpful and telling of Kerry's attitude towards our allies in Eastern Europe:

[T]he reality of his paltry and meaningless diplomacy also shows what a lightweight Kerry is on the world stage. He went to the UN to meet with diplomats about Iraq, and who did he choose? Singapore, Cameroon, and France: two countries that could have no earthly effect on enforcing the UN resolutions, and one that Saddam had bribed into submission. He didn't bother with Bulgaria, one of the nations that Bush convinced to support the liberation of Iraq and one with troops on the ground helping to support its democratization.