Following The New York Times' wildly misleading hit piece on Connecticut attorney general and Democratic senatorial candidate Richard Blumenthal, last weekend's Sunday shows devoted significant attention to the allegations that Blumenthal had misrepresented part of his military service.

According to a Nexis search:

Fox News Sunday devoted 480 words to the Blumenthal story.

NBC's Meet the Press, meanwhile, devoted 598 words to the Blumenthal story.

And ABC's This Week devoted 1,363 words to the story (including gross falsehoods advanced by George Will about related matters).

This Sunday, those same shows should devote comparable attention to a prominent Republican Senate candidate who reportedly made false claims about his own military record.

In an article published this evening, The Washington Post is reporting that Rep. Mark Kirk -- the Republican candidate for Senate in Illinois -- has been forced to admit that he falsely claimed that “he received the U.S. Navy's Intelligence Officer of the Year award for his service during NATO's conflict with Serbia in the late 1990s.”

According to the Post:

The Republican candidate for President Obama's old Senate seat has admitted to inaccurately claiming he received the U.S. Navy's Intelligence Officer of the Year award for his service during NATO's conflict with Serbia in the late 1990s.

Rep. Mark Kirk, a Navy reservist who was elected to Congress in 2001, acknowledged the error in his official biography after The Washington Post began looking into whether he had received the prestigious award, which is given by top Navy officials to a single individual annually.

[...]

In a message on his blog, Kirk wrote that “upon a recent review of my records, I found that an award listed in my official biography was misidentified” and that the award he had intended to list was given to his unit, not to him individually.

Kirk was assigned to a unit based in Aviano, Italy, during the conflict. A professional group, the National Military Intelligence Association, gave the unit an award for outstanding service, according to a revised résumé posted on Kirk's Web site Saturday.

The association's Vice Admiral Rufus L. Taylor Award celebrates “the exceptional achievements of an outstanding Naval Intelligence career professional,” but the citation in 2000 contains no mention of Kirk and instead designates the entire Intelligence Division Electronic Attack Wing at Aviano.

Kirk, whose campaign has emphasized his military service as a reservist, similarly misstated the award during a House committee hearing in March 2002. In a remark recorded by C-Span, he said, “I was the Navy's Intelligence Officer of the Year,” an achievement he depicted as providing special qualifications to discuss national security spending.