If Donald Trump and Joe Biden were on the corner bar at your golf club, arguing about how good they are at the game, as they were in that cringe-worthy "debate" the other night, you wouldn’t go anywhere near them. You’d call their wives to come get them.

How about the old boys: Statler and Waldorf from The Muppets; Trump up-himself, bragging, a bullshit artist of truly cosmic proportions; Biden vacant, mouth-breathing, Mr Havercamp from Caddyshack. "That's a peach, hon'."

If these man are single-figure golfers, I am Napoleon Bonaparte, Emperor of France. 

Trump's a part-time chopper aged 78. I don't care he plays five times a week in a cart with 18 Mulligans, he's still not good enough to break his age. Check out his swing – he's a 12-15-marker, any day of the week. 

Rory McIlroy played with him six years ago, and said: "If he played well he could break 80. But I'd say he'd shoot somewhere between 80 to 85."

Yet Trump says he's plays off two. From a bloke who told so many lies in his four years as President that the Washington Post put on staff just to count them, and the tally was 30,573.

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He could be a two-marker, of course if he's taking Mulligans, gimmes from everywhere and other forms of cheating, and then writing down any old bullshit for a score. 

"I just won two club championships, not even senior," Trump said in the debate. "Two regular club championships. To do that, you have to be quite smart and you have to be able to hit the ball a long way. And I do." 

Walter Mitty also claims he's been club champion at over 20 different country clubs. 

Imagine if he was in your club, post-round, having a beer, and spouting this fantastic bullshit. Imagine the piss would be taken out of him.

Yeah, good, Trumpy. You win Wimbledon, too? 

A thing about Trump's lies is they're easily disprovable. Rick Reilly wrote a cracking book, Commander in Cheat: How Golf Explains Trump, which had the simple premise of talking to people at the clubs Trump said he was club champion at.

Donald Trump tees off in the pro-am ahead of the LIV Golf Invitational Series event at Trump National Golf Club Bedminster in New Jersey. PHOTO: Timothy A. Clary/AFP/Getty Images.

He wasn't club champion at any of them. Well, no - he was at a couple, according to Reilly in an interview with Vox.

“I actually played with him once, and he told me how he does it," Reilly said. "Whenever he opens a new golf course, because he owns 14 and operates another five, he plays the first club champion by himself and declares that the club championship and puts his name on the wall.

“But it’s usually just him and Melania in the cart and nobody else. He just makes it up.”

Of several fine quotes in the interview (have a read, it's funny), Reilly said “Trump cheats like a mafia accountant”.

“I’ve had three or four people tell me they called him on it on the first hole. He kicks the ball so much that caddies call him Pelé. He throws it out of bunkers, he retakes shots, he throws other people’s balls into the water,” Reilly said.

In one game, Trump's opponent hit the green and Trump hit his ball into the water. Minutes later Trump, who was President, had replaced his opponent's ball with his own and was lining up the putt.

When told it was not his ball, Trump's caddy said: “No, this is the President’s ball; your ball went in the water.”

Biden, like everyone else on the entire planet, has less form telling fibs than old Trumpy. But his claims to a six-handicap hold less water than the Gobi Desert. I mean, when did he put a card in last, 1972? The man is 81 years old. He is Mr Havercamp.

And he reckons he's going to go out in the Wednesday stableford competition (I know they don’t play them over there but humour me) and shoot 78 - and break his age by three - when recording 36 points? Does he think he’s Bob Charles?

And hasn’t he had a bit to do the last few years? When's he been out there on the range, grinding, and playing, and maintaining that six handicap by creating new flags in the American version of Golflink?

He's about as much a six-handicap as Stephen Hawking. 

Does it even matter that these two old gibberers own classic vanity handicaps? 

I say it does. The game’s honour system demands people don’t make things up. We should all play to the same rules. And, you know, not cheat. Not lie. Not dishonour the game and the people who made it. Just be honest.

We'll never completely stop handicap-manipulation or cheating. It's not possible to shame the shameless. But honour demands we call out bullshit.

As Reilly said: “I grew up in the game. My dad taught me the game. He taught me that we don’t cheat each other, you don’t cheat your friends, because the space of golf is so huge, it’s the very easiest game to cheat at.

"It’s absolutely a Rorschach test for your morality.”