He lives in a vivid fantasy world that would make Walter Mitty blush — never missing a chance to shamelessly play the hero or embellish a news story.
Reality-challenged NBC anchor Brian Williams once boasted about abandoning a dying buddy to cover the death of Princess Diana — but said it was worth it because it won him worldwide fame.
“I lost a very good friend to Agent Orange-related cancer,” he told Alec Baldwin in a March 2013 interview on the “30 Rock” actor’s “Here’s the Thing” show on WNYC radio.
“I was in the hospital room with him. It was a Saturday night, I had just done ‘Nightly News.’ My pager went off: ‘Diana, car accident, Paris.’ I called the office, and they said, ‘You better get in here,’ ” Williams recalled.
“I had no idea that I’d be announcing to what was then, I mean, they plugged us into cable all over Europe. I have people wherever I go to this day who say, ‘I was with you the night Diana died,’ ” the anchor said.
Williams has spun more wild story lines than his own network’s sitcoms.
He said armed gangs constantly threatened him and his terrified crew while they were covering Hurricane Katrina.
He and his crew even needed gun-toting feds to get out alive, Williams said on NBC’s “Dateline” in 2010.
“I’ve been around a lot of guns and a lot of dead bodies and a lot of people shooting at people to make dead bodies,’’ Williams said at the time.
“But you put them all together, and you put it in the United States of America — and boy, it gets your attention.”
Unfortunately for Williams, authorities had said five years earlier that stories about armed gangs running amok were not true.
Williams had already previously switched his story about the supposed suicide of an evacuee at the city’s Superdome.
He told NBC’s Tom Brokaw that “we watched, all of us watched, as one man committed suicide.”
But he later admitted it was only a story he had heard about and not seen himself.
Williams, predictably, was still taking a beating Friday on Twitter and other social media over the goofy gaffes, as his gleeful critics kept piling on.