President Joe Biden's tendency to utter gaffes and fraudulently embellish the details of his stories deeply offended a key strategic ally against communist China last week -- all so Biden could take a cheap shot at his partisan rival, former President Donald Trump, which in itself was based on a false narrative.

The leader of the South Pacific island nation of Papua New Guinea spoke out to criticize President Biden after it was strongly implied in a campaign speech last week that his uncle had been eaten by "cannibals" after being shot down during World War II, Fox News reported.

The details of Biden's story about the untimely death of his uncle, U.S. Army Air Corps 2nd Lt. Ambrose Finnegan, don't match with the military's official account of what happened, however, and the island nation's leader took offense to the implication that cannibalism is or was a thing that his people practiced.

Biden's false account of his uncle's WWII service and death

During a campaign speech to a steelworkers union in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, last Wednesday, President Biden sought to draw a distinction between himself and former President Trump by referencing an anonymously sourced and unproven claim from several years earlier that Trump had referred to deceased U.S. soldiers and Marines as "suckers" and "losers."

In making that contrast, Biden shared how he'd just visited a war memorial in Scranton that included the name of his uncle, who he claimed had enlisted the day after the D-Day invasion in 1944 and flew single-engine reconnaissance planes in the Pacific theater.

"And he got shot down in New Guinea, and they never found the body because there used to be -- there were a lot of cannibals, for real, in that part of New Guinea," Biden said, clearly implying that his uncle had been eaten by cannibals after being shot down by Japanese forces.

The president told a similar tale while speaking to reporters at the airport after visiting the memorial in Scranton that morning and, as he repeated later in the day, claimed his uncle joined the military after D-Day, flew reconnaissance missions over New Guinea, and "got shot down in an area where there were a lot of cannibals in New Guinea at the time."

Biden's claims fact-checked and proven untrue

To its credit, ABC News fact-checked President Biden's statements at the time and reported that he was "off on details" of his uncle's WWII death, at least in comparison to the official account provided by the Pentagon's Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency.

Per that agency's account, 2nd Lt. Finnegan first enlisted a few weeks after the Pearl Harbor attack in 1941, three years before the D-Day invasion, and died on May 14, 1944 -- several weeks prior to the June 6, 1944 Allied invasion of Nazi-occupied France.

The account also noted that Finnegan was not shot down while flying a reconnaissance plane, but rather was a passenger on a military transport plane that crashed into the ocean after suffering mechanical failures to both engines -- with no mention of any "hostile action" that contributed to the crash, much less that he'd been eaten by cannibals.

Papua New Guinea's prime minister offended by Biden's cannibalism implication

The Associated Press reported Monday that Papua New Guinea Prime Minister James Marape issued a statement a day earlier in which he criticized how President Biden "appeared to imply his uncle was eaten by cannibals" and how "Biden’s remarks may have been a slip of the tongue; however, my country does not deserve to be labeled as such."

"World War II was not the doing of my people; however, they were needlessly dragged into a conflict that was not their doing," he continued. "Perhaps, given President Biden’s comments and the strong reaction from PNG and other parts of the world, it is time for the USA to find as many remains of World War II in PNG as possible, including those of servicemen who lost their lives like Ambrose Finnegan."

"The theaters of war in PNG and Solomon Islands are many, and littered with the remains of WWII including human remains, plane wrecks, ship wrecks, tunnels and bombs," Marape added. "Our people daily live with the fear of being killed by [un]detonated bombs of WWII."

Fox News noted that the White House has brushed off all criticism of President Biden's untrue remarks about his uncle's death in WWII and instead defended what he said while glossing over the dishonesty and attempting to shift the focus to the president's purported care and empathy for military veterans, in contrast to former President Trump's supposed disparagement of those who sacrificed their lives for this country.