There’s something we should know about Joseph R. Biden Jr., as he prepares to take the Democratic Party presidential nomination to run against Donald Trump for the presidency.

It is that this man who’s now in his late 70s has been standing in the middle of the national spotlight since before he turned 30 years of age.

Biden is the presumptive Democratic nominee for president. He now faces allegations from a woman who has accused him of sexual assault in 1993, when he was a veteran U.S. senator from Delaware.

When and why did the national spotlight start shining on this fellow?

He ran for the Senate in 1972. He was elected to that seat before he was old enough to qualify to hold it; the U.S. Constitution says one must be at least 30 years of age to serve in the Senate, but Biden was 29 at the time of his election, but would turn 30 before he took the oath of office.

Then tragedy struck. His wife and daughter were killed in a traffic accident. The young senator-elect considered bowing out, thought about not serving. He was crushed, heartbroken. His allies talked into serving. So he took the oath with the spotlight shining brightly on him from the very beginning of his Senate career.

Biden took office as a single father to two young sons. He commuted back and forth daily between Capitol Hill and his home in Delaware. The nation continued to follow his emotional journey.

He found love again. Sen. Biden married his wife, Jill. They produced a daughter. Their love story became one of Washington’s ongoing feel-good sagas.

And so, with that tragedy behind, with his newfound love, his reputation as a champion for women’s rights on the line, we now are being asked to believe he would squander all of that by attacking Tara Reade, one of the senator’s staffers?

This one strains credulity. Yes, I know there are other stories of politicians who portray themselves as loving family men only to be revealed as cads, philanderers and moral alley cats. I think at this moment of former Sen. John Edwards, the North Carolina Democrat who cheated on his cancer-stricken wife with a woman who would give birth to his child.

Joe Biden isn’t the perfect man. No one can make a claim to perfection. Is he capable of throwing away a lifetime in politics and public service with an astonishingly stupid act such as what has been alleged?

I don’t think so.