What would we do without the New York Times to ask the tough questions about the presidential candidates? Today, Mitt Romney is in the NYT’s crosshairs over his claim to have been a “hunter pretty much all my life.” The headline reads: “Is Romney a Hunter? Depends on What Hunt Is“:

He even trotted out some remembrances, recalling that in hunting with his cousins as a teenager, he struggled to kill rabbits with a single-shot .22-caliber rifle. When they lent him a semiautomatic, it got a lot easier, he said, drawing laughs from an appreciative crowd in Keene, N.H. The last time he went hunting, he said, was last year, when he shot quail in Georgia and “knocked down quite a few birds.” “So I’ve been pretty much hunting all my life,” he said again. But on Wednesday, The Associated Press reported that Mr. Romney had in fact been hunting only twice: once during that summer when he was 15 and spending time at a relative’s ranch in Idaho, and again on the occasion last year, a quail shoot at a fenced-in game preserve in Georgia with major donors to the Republican Governors Association. On Thursday, with Mr. Romney facing reporters’ repeated questions about the A.P. account, his campaign was forced to address his hunting résumé. A campaign spokesman, Eric Fehrnstrom, said Mr. Romney had gone hunting repeatedly during his teenage summer at the ranch. Mr. Romney has also shot small game on his Utah property, said Mr. Fehrnstrom, who added that he did not know how often. “Mitt Romney is not a big-game hunter,” he said, “but he knows how to handle a firearm.”

Why has Romney resorted to such desperate, inexcusable hyperbole? NYT reporter Michael Luo has a theory. It’s because, he posits in the lead paragraph, “Romney has struggled over the last few months to reassure Republican conservatives that he is one of them.”

To be sure, that would be a legitimate subject for the NYT to write about — if the resulting article focused on a comparison of Romney’s positions to those of Republican conservatives. Instead, we get, “What did the governor shoot, and when did he shoot it?”

Who cares?