Sen. Marco Rubio, one of the newest and brightest young leaders in the Republican Party, has led a charmed political life ever since he decided to challenge Charlie Crist, then his own party’s sitting governor, for an open Senate seat last year — and won the race despite the long odds.

Suddenly, he finds himself caught up in an embarrassing political hullaballoo over his family history and qualifications for higher office. Welcome to the NFL, Mr. Rubio.

Nothing that has been learned so far should be a barrier to the senator’s continued success, but in today’s political world, every word and deed becomes subject to intense critical scrutiny. And every claim, no matter how outrageous and unfair, circulates in the blogosphere and eventually reaches a wider audience.

That would apply to the absurd contention about Mr. Rubio’s citizenship. It comes from the same fringe “birthers” who have been trying to discredit President Barack Obama’s own right to be president for years, and it’s just as wacky.

Even making allowances for the somewhat ambiguous nature of the phrase “natural born citizen” in Article II of the Constitution, it requires an extraordinarily cramped and mean-spirited reading to conclude that someone born in this country whose parents were Cuban exiles is not a full-fledged citizen and thus ineligible for the office.

The grand irony is that Mr. Rubio has flirted with this part of the “base” himself and owes some of his success to their support. Over in Louisiana, Gov. Bobby Jindal, another far-right favorite, is in the same boat. Mr. Jindal supports legislation favored by anti-immigration hardliners that requires candidates for federal office to show proof of American birth before they’re allowed on the ballot. Yet that didn’t make him immune to far-right charges that he can’t run for higher office himself because his parents were not U.S. citizens when he was born.

Yikes — the birther revolution is starting to eat its own children! If they’re wise, GOP leaders will pull their party away from this xenophobic fringe and move toward the political center before the party suffers more damage from the cuckoo contingent.

Meanwhile, the controversy over Sen. Rubio’s family history continues to boil because the senator has offered various versions of how his parents got to these shores. This is both less serious than the charge about his qualification for the nation’s highest office, yet more embarrassing because it’s an issue entirely of the senator’s own making.

Did he decide to embellish the facts by claiming he was the son of exiles from communism, implying that the family first left Cuba after Fidel Castro’s takeover, or did he simply not know the facts of their earlier arrival years before his birth?

This distinction may be of interest to the vast family of Cuban-Americans in this country, most of whom have their own painful histories of loss and departure, but it does not alter Mr. Rubio’s life story in any significant way. And he was born here more than a decade after his family arrived. He has no memory of the events in question.

However, he has been forced to correct the record. He should settle on the facts and take more care when recounting his life story in the future.

Mr. Rubio may be feeling a bit roughed-up by this entire episode, but we doubt that it will impose any lasting damage, or that anyone who supports Mr. Rubio will be permanently turned off.

Still, it’s a reminder to the unwary that self-written life stories by political figures may not always consist of the literal truth. Pass the salt.