Mitt Romney — who’s probably my favorite presidential candidate because I’m incredibly shallow and he looks like a computer-generated composite of everybody who’s ever played the president in a movie — has been claiming that his dad marched with Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. in the ’60s. But the Boston Phoenix can’t find any evidence that it really happened:

Asked about the specifics of George Romney’s march with MLK, Mitt Romney’s campaign told the Phoenix that it took place in Grosse Pointe, Michigan. That jibes with the description proffered by David S. Broder in a Washington Post column written days after Mitt’s College Station speech…

But that account is incorrect. King never marched in Grosse Pointe, according to the Grosse Pointe Historical Society, and had not appeared in the town at all at the time the Broder book was published. “I’m quite certain of that,” says Suzy Berschback, curator of the Grosse Pointe Historical Society.

They also give lots of other reasons it probably didn’t happen. In Romney’s defense, he would have been a teenager at the time, so he probably wasn’t really listening. Maybe his dad said, “One time I lunched with Emmett Kelly,” but young Mitt heard it as “marched with MLK,” and nobody ever bothered to correct him.

Hey, maybe it was one of Mitt’s other dads. Don’t Mormons have one mom and a bunch of different dads? Or it could be the other way around, I forget.

Update: Romney says, and I’m paraphrasing, “Well, I didn’t mean it literally.”