Sometimes, a story is so good that even if it’s a complete fabrication, the world runs with it anyway because the tall tale is just that satisfying.

And Republican vice presidential candidate JD Vance has learned that lesson the hard way early into his run with the convicted felon and twice impeached Donald Trump. In July, a Tweet asserting that Vance admitted to bumping uglies with a couch in his book Hillbilly Elegy went viral. It turns out, according to reporting by the Associated Press, in a story that it later pulled, that Vance never wrote about having sexual relations with a sectional.