MITT ROMNEY has managed to attract huge attention with his most recent campaign ad, mostly because of how deceptive the TV spot is. What’s curious is that the Romney team considers the controversy it’s kicked up to be some kind of strategic coup.

The now-infamous ad takes a Barack Obama remark from 2008 - “Senator McCain’s campaign actually said, and I quote, “If we keep talking about the economy, we’re going to lose’ ’’ - and, by clipping the first eight words, makes it seem as though Obama is describing his own plight.

These are dicey doings, particularly on the part of a candidate already under fire for his campaign-trail slickness and expediency. It erodes the high ground Romney might otherwise claim now that he finds himself under assault from distortive TV and web attack ads from the Democratic National Committee, which follow an all-out web ad mugging from a super PAC called Priorities USA Action. Certainly he’d be much better positioned to protest if he weren’t trafficking in the same sort of tactics.

Those, of course, are tactics he decries when his GOP rivals use them on him. When Texas Governor Rick Perry charged that Romney had edited his book to excise a sentence that could be read as endorsing RomneyCare as a national approach, Romney protested that Perry was twisting his intent.

“Words have meaning,’’ he said. If they’re his words, that is.

Romney’s new ad underlines how self-serving his indignation about distortions really is.

About a month later, when Perry accused him of “hiring illegals’’ because a landscaping company had employed several on his property, Romney quickly shifted from disdain to high dudgeon. “Are you just going to keep talking,’’ he barked as his rival pressed the attack, “or are you going to let me finish what I have to say?’’

But Romney’s new ad underlines how self-serving his indignation over distortions really is. After all, he’s practicing the very thing he’s preached against.

Indeed, at least as far as Obama is concerned, this is part of a pattern. Romney, like other Republican candidates, has repeatedly accused Obama of apologizing for America while traveling abroad.

A long Washington Post fact-check in February awarded that GOP charge “four Pinocchios,’’ making it a “whopper’’ of a distortion. But Romney has since upped the ante, saying in June that Obama had “traveled around the globe to apologize for America’’ and alleging in a September debate that the president “went around the world and apologized for America.’’

After a lengthy review of the record, PolitiFact.com, the St. Petersburg Times’s Pulitzer Prize-winning truth watchdog, concluded: “While Obama’s speeches contained some criticism of past US actions, those passages were typically leavened by praise for the United States and its ideals, and he frequently mentioned how other countries have erred as well. We found not a single full-throated apology in the bunch. And on the new angle Romney has added - that the trips were intended to offer the president a forum to apologize to other countries - we think it’s a ridiculous charge.’’ The verdict on Romney’s June and September assertions: a “pants on fire’’ rating.

More recently, Romney, like Texas Governor Rick Perry, has claimed that Obama called Americans lazy in his recent remarks at a business summit in Hawaii. All Obama actually did was say that the United States had gotten a little lazy about promoting itself enough on the world stage. One has to willfully misread his comment to construe it as a criticism of everyday Americans.

And yet Romney did just that. “Sometimes I just don’t think that President Obama understands America,’’ Romney said. “Now, I say that because this week, or was it last week, he said that Americans are lazy. I don’t think that describes Americans.’’ This is such a blatant attempt to twist Obama’s comment that it blinks “RIDICULOUS’’ in JumboTron letters.

Now, Republican partisans may not care a whit. Yet if the occasional GOP front-runner persists in making charges that only a dope could believe, discerning moderates may come to a disturbing conclusion:

Either Romney falls into the dope category himself, or he’s made the cynical calculation that a majority of voters do.