Gov. Jim Gibbons is at it again.

Fibbing, we mean.

It’s been well-documented the Gibbons literally came into office on a pack of lies. What’s surprising is that those lies were unnecessary; had he simply admitted he was taking the oath of office at midnight to void some of Gov. Kenny Guinn’s last-minute appointments, he may have looked petty, but he could have argued he was acting to preserve his executive privileges.

Instead, he gave us a line about how unspecified security threats prompted the midnight oath at his Reno home. (Sadly, it appears we will never learn what we at Various Things & Stuff have long suspected: Guinn’s appointments were valid, and the ones that Gibbons made thereafter were not.)

But wait, there’s more, as the late-night infomercials might say. Gibbons has seemingly told yet another fib. Apparently, Gibbons is planning "significant policy changes" in the budget he’ll submit to the Legislature this year.

As the Review-Journal’s Molly Ball noted in her piece (linked above), this comes after Gibbons told the Associated Press he’d leave "small fingerprints" on the spending place that Guinn left for him, and an interview last week in which Gibbons said he didn’t have time to alter many details of Guinn’s budget.

But as it turns out, Gibbons has actually made what Ball describes as "a radical departure" from Guinn’s policies. "We’re making significant policy changes in how taxpayer dollars are being spent in the state of Nevada," he said. "You’ll see a big difference between the previous administration and mine. The status quo for the last 40 years in Nevada is going to change. It’s going to be very exciting."

Oh, yes, we feel all tingly just thinking about it. (We bet that former Govs. Paul Laxalt [1967-1971] and Robert List [1979-1983], both Republicans who helped make that "status quo" over the last 40 years, are excited about the change, too. And List is on Gibbons’ transition battalion!)

Gibbons refused to give Ball details of his budget, saying all would be made clear when the document arrives at the Legislature. (We suspect that this is yet another lie; Gibbons probably doesn’t know the details because they’ve been written by somebody else.)

Here’s the thing we can’t get over: Why lie? Why say you’re not going to make big changes, and then make big changes? Gibbons ran as a fiscal conservative, promising to be thrifty in the way he spent taxes if he was elected. So if he were to have instead said he was going to radically depart from Guinn’s budget and make big changes, nobody would have been surprised at all. (In fact, political observers were surprised when Gibbons said he wasn’t going to make many changes.)

But by first saying he wouldn’t make big changes, and now going back on that, Gibbons has further damaged his rapidly diminishing credibility. It wasn’t just a lie; it was a totally unnecessary and counterproductive lie. And this administration can’t afford even one more of those, before a nickname like Gibber the Fibber, or Fibbons, or any of the other cute names tossed at the state’s chief executive by creative posters in the blogosphere starts to stick.

Fibbons. Hey, that’s got a nice ring to it.