Surely this was just an inadvertent mistake, made in good faith and promptly reported when discovered. Oh, wait ....

Hunter claimed he was paying Dad $50,000 a month in rent while living with the Corvette and secret documents, but Dad didn’t report it.

On the Schedule E portion of his 2017 tax forms, Joe Biden reported $19,800 in “rents received,” and none in 2018, according to information reported on Sunday by Breitbart’s Wendell Husebø.

You should know that Joe Biden’s Wilmington home “is currently valued at $1,380,800 by real estate website Zillow.com” and has an estimated rental value of about $7,600 per month.

If you’re thinking, “Hunter must have been on drugs to pay six and a half times what that place is worth!” And, of course, Hunter was on drugs.

But at the same time Hunter Biden was self-documenting his antics with various drugs and Russian prostitutes, he was being paid about $50,000 per month by Burisma, the corrupt Ukraine energy giant.

Maybe the board at Burisma mistook Hunter for a productive employee in the same way Hunter once mistook a small piece of parmesan cheese for a crack rock and tried to smoke it. Or, more likely, Hunter Biden was a convenient conduit to Joe Biden.

There’s more than one way to kick back 10% to “the Big Guy,” and making vastly inflated rent payments is certainly one of them.

If a son wants to pay his dad too much rent — for any reason — that’s one thing. But if dad doesn’t report those earnings to the IRS, that’s a very different thing. It’s called “being a tax cheat.”

It’s entirely possible that Hunter lied on the screening form about the rent he paid. Although if ApplyCheck had asked for receipts, that would have brought to a screeching halt whatever Hunter was trying to do with them.

The mainstream media was awfully interested in President Donald Trump’s tax returns, right up until we learned that he paid a lot of taxes when he made a lot of money and didn’t pay much in taxes when he lost money. That’s when the long-simmering story was suddenly neglected like yesterday’s cold oatmeal.

We’ll know that the Democrats are done with Joe is they unleash their media arm to go after this, and the rest of the Delaware mess.