We in North Texas have been privileged in recent days to observe two classic examples of brazen mendacity as they unspooled on television and in the public prints.

In Denton, a criminal suspect has denied the charges against him by claiming to be an undercover operative for some murky American intelligence agency. In Washington, D.C., a United States representative has responded to convincing evidence of wrongdoing with a series of jaw-dropping explanations, each one more fantastic than the last.

Joshua Mitchell, meet Eddie Bernice Johnson.

Mitchell is currently a guest in the local poky as (real) law enforcement officers go over a laundry list of warrants and criminal charges that he has accrued in several states under at least two names. The feds have also expressed an interest in Mitchell due to his insistence that he is not a master criminal, but a master spy, working in deep cover with the help of 25 fake badges and a “Special Agent” ball cap.

Johnson is a Democratic congresswoman from Dallas who was written up last week by The Dallas Morning News for giving charity scholarships to her own relatives and those of her staff in direct violation of the rules set out by the Congressional Black Caucus Foundation, the scholarship sponsor.

Since the appearance of the News article, and the follow-up coverage in the national press, Johnson has issued a series of lame statements that has made Joshua Mitchell sound like Honest Abe Lincoln. First she said she didn’t do anything wrong. Then she said she hadn’t been aware that what she did was wrong. Now she says her chief of staff did it and that all records of the scholarships had disappeared from her congressional office.

While Eddie Bernice Johnson and Joshua Mitchell share a gift for creative storytelling, their styles are very different. Mitchell has, at least as of this writing, maintained his fanciful story, chatting up reporters and lawmen alike with tales of his exploits as a super spy.

Johnson, on the other hand, has stumbled from one excuse to another as each story is shot out from under her by the facts. Her last statement, a variation on the “dog ate my homework” defense, seemed to be the last gasp of a desperate woman, indicating that she may at last be at the end of her rope.

Mitchell, by contrast, remains the happy fabulist, the Angus MacGyver of the Panhandle, even in the face of incontrovertible evidence. A more plausible story would have served him better when he was first caught up in the nets of the Denton police, but he stuck with the fantasy. One senses that he has some kind of emotional stake in his secret agent alter ego that has little or nothing to do with his darker side. (And, make no mistake about it, there is a darker side. The Record-Chronicle’s Donna Fielder reported in Friday’s paper that a private investigator said a 78-year-old man was beaten by Mitchell after demanding the rent on a house in Garland.)

Johnson doesn’t seem to take any pleasure in unrolling her continuous, ever-changing series of lame explanations. She is angry — angry at her political opponents, who are chortling with glee at her predicament, and angry most of all at the newspaper that revealed the truth about her actions.

There is, of course, one more difference between Joshua Mitchell and Eddie Bernice Johnson, a difference that we find a little hard to understand.

Johnson is in Congress and Mitchell is in jail.