It always helps your campaign in a swing state when one of the leading newspapers in that state editorializes that your opponent is a flaming liar.

Last week, Romney recklessly told a large audience in Defiance that he’d read that Chrysler’s Italian owners — that would be Fiat, which has controlled the American automaker since 2009 — were planning to move all Jeep production to China.

[snip]

The news is a sign of Chrysler’s health, not of some sinister intentions by its management. The company is investing $500 million and hiring 1,100 workers at its Toledo Jeep plant. The day Romney misspoke, Chrysler announced plans to add 1,100 employees in Detroit, too. A company spokesman called any suggestion that Chrysler is abandoning its U.S. plants “a leap that would be difficult even for professional circus acrobats.”

Ah, but not for a presidential candidate who needs a wedge in auto-dependent Ohio. Romney is now running an ad that reinforces the erroneous perception he laid out in Defiance, but in language that is technically true: “Obama took GM and Chrysler into bankruptcy and sold Chrysler to Italians who are going to build Jeeps in China.”

In one sentence, Romney presses hot buttons about bankruptcy — though he, too, favored that route, albeit without direct federal investment — foreigners and outsourcing. It’s a masterpiece of misdirection.