As I recounted below, Barack Obama told ABC’s George Stephanopoulos that he considered joining the U.S. military after graduating high school, but decided against it because the U.S. wasn’t “engaged in an active military conflict at that point.”

The full quote is as follows:

You know, I actually did. I had to sign up for Selective Service when I graduated from high school.

And I was growing up in Hawaii. And I have friends whose parents were in the military. There are a lot of Army, military bases there.

And I actually always thought of the military as an ennobling and, you know, honorable option. But keep in mind that I graduated in 1979. The Vietnam War had come to an end. We weren’t engaged in an active military conflict at that point. And so, it’s not an option that I ever decided to pursue.

Now, there is technically no overt, provable lie in the above statement. Instead, all we have to go on is circumstantial and historical evidence — such as the fact that this supposed desire to serve his country never made it into either of his lengthy memoirs, and the fact that the Selective Service registration requirement was suspended at the time he is speaking of in the above quote.

Now, Bob Owens at Pajamas Media is reporting that Obama did, in fact, register with Selective Services — in September of 1980, well after he had graduated high school and departed Hawaii for college in California.

So, technically Obama’s claim — that he grew up in Hawaii, and that he registered for Selective Services — was true. The details, though, were far less straightforward than that.

A reader emailed the following astute commentary to Jonah Goldberg at The Corner:

he did not register “when (he) graduated from high school” as he said today on ABC. In fact, he didn’t register until a year and a half later when he was already a college student at Occidental.

That significantly undermines his explaination that he actually considered joining the military because he was living in Hawaii and a lot of his friends had military connections. It also undermines his excuse that we were no longer engaged in “active” conflict.

When he registered, he was not a high school graduate exploring career options. He was a college student in a world in which the Soviet Union had invaded Afghanistan and the Iranians had captured our embassy in Tehran.

When a person is already having trouble having his statements taken at face value because of his past problems with being truthful (for whatever reason) about the details, it gives off a very strong signal that the person in question cannot be trusted to tell the truth about the big things.

In light of yet another case of being less than entirely forthright about the details here, Mr. Obama may need to spend a little more time getting the seemingly more minor bits of his various stories down before he next appears before the cameras, lest he cause people to further question his veracity and his attention to fact and detail.