Maryland gubernatorial candidate Wes Moore has not always been as “clear and transparent” about his childhood ties to Baltimore City, as he says. Through the years, he’s allowed others (including The Sun and media giant Oprah Winfrey) to misrepresent him as a Baltimore native without correcting the record. And he’s used misleading terms like “coming home to Baltimore” when writing for this newspaper about moving his family here from the New York City area as an adult.

His real geographic history is hardly a secret, however. As he’s pointed out himself, it’s largely laid out in his 2010 book, “The Other Wes Moore,” which contrasts his upbringing and opportunities with that of a Baltimore man of roughly the same age who shares his name and is currently serving a life sentence at the Jessup Correctional Institution for the murder of a Baltimore County police sergeant in 2000.

The author Wes Moore was born in a Washington, D.C., hospital in 1978. He spent his first five years in Takoma Park, Maryland, then moved with his mother to the Bronx, New York. In 1991, he was sent to boarding school at Valley Forge Military Academy in Wayne, Pennsylvania.

A few years later, when he was 15, his mother moved back to Maryland, to Pasadena in Anne Arundel County. When he was home from school, Mr. Moore spent many days and nights in Baltimore during his formative teen years, the basis, he says, for feeling like Charm City was home.

But he didn’t have an official address in the city until he was a young man attending Johns Hopkins University. He would go on to live in, among other places, the United Kingdom, where he studied at Oxford University as a Rhodes scholar (following in the footsteps of Baltimore Mayor Kurt Schmoke, for whom Mr. Moore interned in the late ‘90s); Georgia, Missouri and Afghanistan as part of his military service; and the New York City region, where he worked as an investment banker before he and his wife chose to move to Baltimore a decade ago to raise a family.

So, no, he wasn’t born here, as was noted in a recent “political dossier” circulated in an attempt to undermine his credibility. And he did most of his growing up elsewhere.

Pardon us if we fail to clutch our pearls.

Of course we want government representatives to be transparent and forthright, but in the annals of exaggeration, this hardly merits a mention when it comes to politicians and political hopefuls — a group well known for bending facts to fit their narratives.

If this is the worst misrepresentation a team of political operatives can dredge up, we’d say they’re either pretty poor researchers, or Mr. Moore is as wholesome as he’d have you believe.

And there’s no doubt he has a long record of championing Charm City, jumping into various volunteer efforts as soon as he and his wife arrived: serving on the board of the Baltimore Community Foundation, coaching city teens about technology use in schools and working with a group of military veterans to revitalize the East Baltimore neighborhood of Oliver.

“The challenges that Baltimore (along with many other major American cities) faces don’t blind me to the extraordinary municipality we live in and the extraordinary Baltimoreans we are surrounded by,” he wrote in a 2012 op-ed for The Sun, outlining the city’s strengths and areas for improvement.

“I remain inspired by the hundreds of thousands of us who focus not only on what is wrong with us and on what we hope to be, but also celebrate who we already are.”

How refreshing. With so many people seeking to distance themselves from Baltimore and it’s ongoing problems of crime, poverty and a legacy of systemic racism, it’s ironic that Mr. Moore is being criticized for trying to further align himself with it.

We wish more people — political candidates and city residents alike — were as proud of and invested in Maryland’s economic engine as Mr. Moore.

The state’s fate is intertwined with the city’s; recognizing the potential in Baltimore and working to achieve it benefits us all.