To Tell The Truth

My 13 year old son approached me last night asking- " If someone tells a lie, but believes it to be true, what does that mean?"
I was in the middle of cleaning, cooking dinner,and thinking of ways to take over the world when I answered,
"That is called a compulsive liar."
Whereupon he said, "ReallY?"
I then took myself away from my task and asked "Why do you want to know?"
And he proceeded to tell me that he had, on a few occasions, stretched the truth or completly lied about things he had done when talking to his friends.
He had my complete attention now.
I put up with a lot of things, but lying is not one of them. I was raised that in life, there will be times when all we have is our word, and without it, we are nothing. I did my best to instill this in my son as well.
I let him know that it was not OK to be telling lies, because, they make things very complicated, and you have to keep going back to the source of that lie to make any sense or you'll get caught.
I also let him know that if you got to be known as someone who tells fables all the time, no one would believe you when you were telling the truth, and would take everything you said with a grain of salt, and that is no way to be.
he took all this in and went to his room for a while.
He came back later and looked very sheepish and sad.
I asked him what was wrong.
"You think I'm a bad person." He said.
"No," I said, " A bad person wouldn't have told me these things, and wouldn;t care who he hurts with his lies. You are a good person for telling me, it means you have a conscience."
And with that, I gave him a long hug and let him know how much I will love him, no matter what.