This just keeps getting more and more absurd. Now the tall tale about China drilling for oil off American shores has found its way into a House GOP candidate's campaign flyer.

And to make matters even more ridiculous, the candidate's staffers are giving us conflicting information about whether he even sent it out!

The flyer is the work of John Gard, a Wisconsin Republican who narrowly lost a Congressional race in 2006 and is now seeking a rematch against freshman Democrat Steve Kagen. It was handed out at a county fair on June 15, a few days after Dick Cheney was forced to admit that his story about China drilling for oil in the Gulf of Mexico was false.

And this gets even sillier still.

At first, Gard campaign manager Ellen Nowak told us that these flyers had been scrapped. "We didn't print them that way," Nowak said, after the text was read to her over the phone.

Then she made the mistake of referring us to communications director Mark Graul, who confirmed the flyer's existence. But he said it wasn't about China, insisting that the "foreign nations" reference was to India, Brazil and other countries. "We now know that China are not drilling per se," Graul said, "but other foreign countries are."

Sadly, that's not true, either. Oil companies in India, Canada, Spain and other countries have indeed signed exploration leases with Cuba. But as McClatchy has noted, those same companies have expressed concern that it isn't economical to drill for oil in those places at this point in time. Due to the lack of refinery capacity and the difficulty of reaching oil in those sources, any actual drilling won't start for at least the next few years.

This brings us to a total of four confirmed cases of Republicans continuing to push this story even after Dick Cheney retracted the claim -- and we're still counting.