We have come to the end of another year, and so it is once again time for PolitiFact to tell us what the 2012 "Lie Of The Year" is.

This year, PolitiFact has singled out Mitt Romney's campaign ad that made an untrue claim about President Barack Obama, Chrysler, and jobs building Jeeps being sent to China. "It was a lie," says PolitiFact, "told in the critical state of Ohio in the final days of a close campaign."

In case you missed the controversy, PolitiFact offers a recap:

It originated with a conservative blogger, who twisted an accurate news story into a falsehood. Then it picked up steam when the Drudge Report ran with it. Even though Jeep's parent company gave a quick and clear denial, Mitt Romney repeated it and his campaign turned it into a TV ad.

 what perhaps set this occasion apart, PolitiFact says, is the fact that the Romney campaign stood by the ad "even after the media and the public expressed collective outrage against something so obviously false."

A big reason reporters expressed outrage is because the Romney campaign had baited them almost a year earlier. After they expressed some alarm that a Romney ad from the fall of 2011 was entirely based on a hysterical lie, a Romney operative said that the campaign absolutely intended to keep lying in its ads, because that was the entire point of them: