Smooth-talking, sharply-dressed, and armed with election pamphlets showing him shaking hands with Mikhail Gorbachev, Ronald Reagan, George Bush and Bill Clinton, Dr Avi Ben-Avraham, whispered by some to be the grandson of Albert Einstein, went down a storm with the Likud Party activists whose support he was seeking in his attempt to secure a seat in the Knesset.
So much so that, when the party's central committee convened last month to choose its Knesset candidates, it voted him into 28th place on the Likud slate - just three places behind the Defence Minister, Mr Moshe Arens - giving him a pretty good chance of realising his parliamentary ambitions in the general elections on May 17th.
But if Dr Ben-Avraham sounded almost too perfect to be true, that's because much of what so impressed the Likud activists is turning out to be false.
There is considerably less to super-candidate Dr Ben-Avraham, an investigation by Israel's tabloid Yediot Ahronot newspaper established this weekend, than he gave his Likud supporters to believe.
Contrary to what they may have heard and read about him, he did not spend his teens participating in research into nuclear physics at Israel's Weizmann Institute of Science. He has never been nominated for a Nobel Prize - not for peace, and not for physics.
He may have received a medical doctorate, aged 18, from an Italian university, but he completed only two years of study.
He has never given medical treatment to a Pope.
Oh, and he's not Einstein's grandson.
Back-pedalling furiously, Dr Ben-Avraham now insists he never made the grandiose biographical claims that have now been disproved.
But, despite reports that he hired a photographer to immortalise the moment when he thrust out his hand to unwitting passing presidents, he's standing by his claims to be good friends with many of the world's leading statesmen.
If privately embarrassed to have been suckered, the Likud is keeping mum about the exposure of the true Dr Ben-Avraham.
After all, if he won over the cynical politicians of the Likud central committee, maybe he'll be able to repeat the trick with the Israeli electorate.