Far be it for us to accuse WaPo‘s award-winning Gene Weingarten of making things up when he writes his columns. Last week he wrote about imaginary conversations he had with his dog and a wayward mouse in his home. This week, as FBDC’s Peter Ogburn mentioned earlier today,  Weingarten pens a column about hitting the gym, and guess what? Some readers weren’t buying it.

Embarrassingly, the accusations reached such epic proportions that Weingarten felt the need to defend himself.

A sampling of reactions:

• Anonymous: “Geez, do you think this was a serious article? Do you think that Gene really went to a gym? The only fact in this story is probably the color blindness test and the comment of that teacher. … Oh, and of course Tom is a butcher.”
• “Gene tried riding a bicycle for exercise. but he kept yelling at himself to get off the sidewalk.”

Weingarten: “Just in case, and just for the record — yeah, I went to the gym, and have been going almost daily. If I had NOT gone to the gym, and written that I had, it would have been journalistic malpractice — yeah, even in a humor column. Truth is always funnier than fiction because, you know, it’s real, and real life is funny.”

Oh yes, Gene, we know.