Kleenex sales may have shattered records in the DC metropolitan area this weekend thanks to The Washington Post’s nearly 5,000-word pity party for Hunter Biden. The Post revealed that “Hunter’s relationship with his own last name has . . . invited burdens and scrutiny.”

The multimillions Hunter pocketed in payoffs from shady foreigners was a paltry consolation for the burdens of his famous last name.

Since The New York Post exposed the contents of Hunter Biden’s laptop in October 2020, congressional investigations and other probes have uncovered one gold-plated racketeering episode after another.

But the inferior Post assured readers Hunter “has at times been protective of the Biden name and shied away from taking advantage too directly.”

Since Hunter didn’t rent neon lights in Times Square to advertise his hustling, he didn’t go too far. And almost all his tribulations were no fault of his own.

According to The Washington Post, Hunter Biden was a victim of Barack Obama’s selection of his father as a vice-presidential candidate. “Hunter’s firm was thriving” but tanked after the Obama administration “imposed strict lobbying restrictions” on Biden family members.

So Hunter started a new firm and “used relationships forged over a politically active life,” the article declared.

In case readers have any doubts, The Post trots out an anonymous former Hunter business associate who declared: “The stuff he was doing was completely normal.”

And if you can’t trust anonymous Hunter Biden accomplices, then who can you trust?

But even better than an unnamed Hunter cohort is the official exoneration from the Beltway’s Delphi Oracle: “A Washington Post review of Hunter Biden’s career found no sign the family patriarch was an active participant in his son’s business efforts.”

This relies on an Alice-in-Wonderland vanishing definition of “active participant.” Regardless of how many lies Joe Biden told about having no involvement in his family’s political hustles, regardless of meeting at least 14 of Hunter’s business associates while he was vice president, regardless of his brazen falsehood that Hunter had no business in China in his final debate with Donald Trump, the president must be presumed innocent until a specific kickback is discovered in his pocket — preferably in foreign currency.

The Washington Post castigates House Republicans who “have not produced any direct evidence” that “Joe Biden improperly benefited from his son’s work or used his office to assist the younger Biden.”

Congress and the Supreme Court define corruption extremely narrowly — requiring an explicit quid pro quo for a payoff. None of the Bidens is as boneheaded as former Rep. William Jefferson, who was caught with $90,000 in bribes stashed in his freezer.

After his father became vice president, “Hunter and his business partners scoured the globe for business opportunities,” the Post noted. “It was not unusual for Hunter to travel abroad with his father, giving him access to high-level officials, although former associates say he reimbursed the government for the flights.”

Reimbursing the US Treasury for the coach-fare equivalent on Delta airlines is a helluva bargain for awing foreign clients by strutting down a gangplank next to the US vice president.

Rattling off a list of foreign clients, the Post says, “Hunter also . . . took a seat on the board of Burisma, an energy company in Ukraine . . . at a time when Joe Biden was the face of the Obama administration’s efforts to crack down on corruption in Ukraine.”

And the only problem was that some Republicans howled.

Can we have a crowdfunding campaign so reporter Matt Viser can purchase access to The Washington Post’s archives? Hunter’s Burisma deal was recognized as scandalous as soon as it was announced. In 2014, a Washington Post analysis said the appointment looked “very bad” — “nepotistic at best, nefarious at worst.”

Did Joe Biden’s brazen threats that led to the firing of the Ukrainian prosecutor investigating Burisma somehow expunge the taint of his son’s appointment?

Other passages in the article indicate debilitating levels of gullibility. After mentioning how Hunter arranged for Mexican businessmen including billionaire Carlos Slim to have breakfast with the vice president, an anonymous “person familiar with the encounters” assured The Post that “the meetings were not substantive.” Instead, the source said, “It was way more, ‘My friends are in town. Is it all right if we come up for breakfast?’ . . . It was, ‘Yeah, of course.’ ”

How can someone publish such malarkey and not be laughed out of journalism?

“The Biden brand is not mine to f–k up,” Hunter told people — at least according to another unnamed source.

Historians will recognize Joe did vastly more to destroy the “Biden brand” than did Hunter. And all the anonymous sources The Washington Post can find or invent won’t be enough to salvage the 46th president’s reputation.