As usual, Mayor Putz was late yesterday. The 20-minute delay for a program at Boys and Girls High School set a lousy example for students, but the real disgrace was the web of fiction he spun about academic progress when he arrived.

True to his tic of using inflated language, he used the Brooklyn visit to give himself an inflated grade on his education efforts at 94 failing schools. Breathlessly praising the “FIRST SIGNS OF PROGRESS IN STRUGGLING SCHOOLS,” a City Hall press release served up a steaming heap of jargon and gibberish to make it seem a new program is delivering instant miracles. It boasted of “a new momentum” and “climbing attendance rates,” along with longer school days and more teacher accountability.

If even half of that were true, a celebration would be in order. But as charter groups immediately noted, Bill de Blasio’s claims are grossly misleading. Their good manners prevent them from calling him a liar.

“The notion that everything has changed is ridiculous,” said Jenny Sedlis, executive director of StudentsFirstNY. She pointed to reports that older students were being pushed out of Boys and Girls, as reflected in a 31 percent drop in student population since October, which improves the profile of remaining students.

And while the school day is longer, there is actually less instructional time for students, she said. As for accountability, the mayor’s new program basically lets the teachers union decide which teachers keep their jobs.

Another critic, Jeremiah Kittredge, CEO of Families for Excellent Schools, said of de Blasio’s program, “New Yorkers have heard this script before. Grouping together failing schools and handing them over to the bureaucracy is a recipe for failure.”

The backdrop of the back-and-forth is that de Blasio is trying to pull rabbits out of hats to fool Albany into believing he knows what he’s doing. He shouldn’t get his hopes up because, so far, there’s no evidence that he’s even on the same planet as the real reform movement. He has nothing to show except his own words.

His timing is also lousy. This is shaping up as a consequential legislative session on education, with everything from additional state subsidies to mayoral control on the table, and the mayor is playing an extremely weak hand.

His best friend in Albany, former Speaker Sheldon Silver, is now an indicted backbencher, yet de Blasio remains joined at the hip — or did he sell his soul? — to the unions. They want to fend off Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s call for more rigorous teacher evaluations and a mere three-year extension of mayoral control. De Blasio and his union pals want seven, which shows how comfortable they are with him.

Moreover, Cuomo wants persistently failing schools like Boys and Girls to be handed over to a state receiver, who would have the power to work around union rules. The governor also wants to lift the charter cap, and supports a tuition tax credit for schools — all of which de Blasio and the unions oppose.

The upshot is that the mayor’s appearance at Boys and Girls was a stunt designed to get more money and a freer hand from Albany. But his inflated claims about his success won’t fool anyone who really cares about student achievement. Indeed, his claims are an insult to the truth.

Remember, too, that de Blasio’s campaign against Republicans last year backfired, and the GOP won the state Senate by running against him and Al Sharpton. As for Cuomo, he and the mayor no longer pretend to be friends or to agree on much.

Nor does the mayor pretend to care what his critics think. Blowing off complaints from Rockaway residents who complained when he showed up 30 minutes late for Saturday’s St. Patrick’s Parade, the mayor refused again yesterday to provide any details about an education meeting he claimed caused his tardiness.

“We’re very comfortable with the way we approach things and we’re very comfortable with our priorities,” he said in a statement to The Post.

Take that, little people. The King has spoken.

Thanks to Richard Nixon, we know that all presidents probably have enemies lists. In the last two weeks, we’ve seen who is on Barack Obama’s: Israel and Republicans.

Iran’s mad mullahs, Vladimir Putin, Islamic State beheaders, Hamas terrorists, the Butcher of Damascus — they didn’t make the list. Then again, they only kill Americans and wage genocidal war against Jews, Christians and our allies. The really, really bad people are those who oppose Dear Leader.

Israel and 47 GOP senators qualified by opposing Obama’s emerging deal that would, as Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu told Congress, pave the way for an Iranian nuke. The Republicans, after the president rejected any role for Congress, won their badge of honor by writing a letter to Iran to warn that the deal could become invalid when Obama leaves office.

The president responded by accusing Netanyahu and the GOP of wanting war while he wants peace. Nothing new there. No matter the issue, only he sees Truth and Justice and everybody else is ignorant and corrupt. It must be awfully lonely up there.

“It’s somewhat ironic to see some members of Congress wanting to make common cause with the hard-liners in Iran,” Obama told reporters. “It’s an unusual coalition.”

Actually, it’s Obama who made common cause with Iran’s hard-liners. He’s agreed to let the world’s largest sponsor of terrorism keep enriching uranium, and to phase out all restrictions after a decade. He made all the compromises, leaving Iran’s plan for regional dominance and nuclear power intact.

And he wants to do all of this with no oversight or ratification required. Indeed, he is keeping the details secret, hoping to finish the deal by the end of the month and present it as a fait accompli.

So once again I ask: Whose side is he on?

Hillary Clinton’s repeated insistence that she used a private email account for “convenience” as secretary of state is a howler that won’t wash.

So, then, why did she do it? My bet is that while she clearly wanted to keep secrets from Congress, she was more worried about White House spies, some of them working at State. She and President Obama don’t trust each other, and her private emails kept him in the dark about what she was doing and saying.

Demonstrating an uncanny gift for nonsense, some City Council members want to deputize New Yorkers to shoot videos of vehicles illegally idling, then pay them a bounty when drivers are fined.

Here’s a better idea: Let’s have a whistleblower law that rewards New Yorkers for documenting council waste and fraud. That could be a shovel-ready jobs program and yield a better payoff than the lottery.