The Washington Post awards Hillary Clinton four Pinocchios for her tall tale of coming under sniper fire in Bosnia.

Hillary Clinton has a problem: her little Bosnia story has boomeranged. Instead of proving that she acquired real foreign affairs experience as First Lady, her tale of coming under enemy fire in March 1996 as she landed in Tuzla has now itself drawn fire from the Obama campaign and threatens to seriously undermine whatever advantage she might have gained from the Jeremiah Wright affair.

As my esteemed colleague James Withers first noted on this site yesterday, Sinbad Got It Right. The comedian called the senator on her tall tale of coming under fire as they landed to entertain U.S. troops engaged in peacekeeping in the wartorn province of the former Yugoslavia. Hillary immediately dismissed Sinbad as “a comedian,” but the joke seems to be on her, as the exaggeration of the danger in which the First Lady found herself upon landing in Tuzla has raised serious questions about the possibility of other exaggerations of her record.

“As has now been conclusively established by video film and news photographs, Hillary Clinton did NOT come under sniper fire in Bosnia in March 1996 when she made a morale-boosting visit to U.S. troops enforcing the 1995 Dayton Peace Agreement,” declared The Fact Checker in the Washington Post. “But she is taking plenty of bullets for her over-dramatic accounts of the trip,” Fact Checker continues.

“I remember landing under sniper fire,” the senator from New York said at a campaign event last week. “There no greeting ceremony, and we basically were told to run to our cars,” she added.

After hearing Hillary’s account of the landing in Tuzla, CBS News reporter Sharyl Attkisson — who was actually on that flight with the FirstLady — dug up film footage film footage from their report on the landing in Tuzla showing a smiling First Lady’ receiving a hug from an eight-year-old Bosnian girl and then singing with Sinbad and Sheryl Crow at the U.S. military base. Now on YouTube, that CBS News film footage has been viewed by hundreds of thousands of peopl — “A reminder that in politics, memory should always match the videotape,” as Attkinson puts it.

The fabrication of the story of having come under fire in Bosnia is particularly inexplicable in light of the fact that Hillary actually wrote about the episode (in an account sans sniper fire) in her autobiography. If Hillary had a faulty memory, as she now says, couldn’t she have checked her own sources — including her memoirs?

Hillary now says that she “misspoke” in describing the incident in Tuzla. “The backpedaling was a rare instance of Mrs. Clinton’s acknowledging an error, and she did so on a sensitive issue: She has cited her ’strength and experience’ since the start of the presidential race, framing her 80 trips abroad as first lady as preparation for dealing with foreign affairs as president,” write Patrick Healy and Katherine Q. Seelye in the New York Times. “That argument was behind her campaign’s ‘red phone’ commercial, which cast her as best able to handle a crisis,” Healy and Seelye note.

Still, along with the admission came Hillary’s assertion that “for the first time in 12 or so years, I misspoke.” And that admission came only after one of the networks showed film that directly contradicted her account of the landing at Tuzla. But in fact, it wasn’t “the first time in 12 or so years.” Hillary has actually told the same tall tale about Tuzla before, including in a speech on February 29, as Ben Smith notes on Politico.com. So the Bosnia story may be less of a ‘misstatement’ than a fabrication.

The Tall Tale from Tuzla will no doubt raise questions about the true extent of Hillary’s foreign policy experience, which she may be as guilty of exaggerating as her account of that 1996 trip to Bosnia.