For a couple of weeks now, liberal blogs have remorselessly ridiculed Republicans for claiming that the IRS is going to have to hire 16,000 or 16,500 additional IRS agents as a result of the Affordable Care Act.

Professional liars like Newt Gingrich continued to retail this multiply-fictitious talking point well after it had been comprehensively debunked by FactCheck.org, back on March 30.

So you’ll be glad to hear that all the criticism has actually had an effect.

When a Republican House member felt compelled to repeat the talking point yesterday, he shaded it a bit toward the truth. He may have used the same outrageously exaggerated number, and he did claim the new employees are needed “to enforce these new restrictions” (instead of “to administer tax credits and subsidies”), but, hey, he did say “IRS workers” instead of “IRS agents”:

And to make matters worse, an army of more than 16,000 IRS workers will be hired to enforce these new restrictions.

In Republican circles, correcting one lie and repeating only two others presumably passes for honesty. The House member in question? None other than Rep. Joe Wilson of South Carolina. Yes, the “You lie!” guy.

(We have not yet been able to confirm reports that he now routinely shouts that signature phrase at himself while shaving, but our fly-on-the-wall army is working on it. We hope to have YouTube video any day now.)