Electoral campaigns are the times that try speech writers’ souls.

Now, if Melania Trump had done something like that — borrowed stealthily instead of pilfering vast tracts from a Michelle Obama speech for her address to Republican multitudes Monday in Cleveland — she would not be in such a plagiarism pickle today.

That’s how you do it, Mrs. Trump. Lift something famous — in this case from Thomas Paine — and tweak it to your own needs. In fact, keep it brief and you can dot your speech with creativity of a decidedly derivative sort and appear almost erudite. This is called research.

But borrow whole passages from a single source in a ham-handed cut-and-paste job — especially from the wife of the current president doing the very job years ago that you were supposed to be doing now — and, well, that way there be dragons.

In the age of technology, no one gets away with it — especially when you’re trying to fence the stolen goods before millions upon millions of viewers.

Still, to coin a phrase, let he who is without sin cast the first indignant tweet.

Truth be told, Mrs. Trump, you have merely followed a well-worn trail. Didn’t George Harrison pinch the melody of The Chiffons’ hit He’s So Fine for his own My Sweet Lord? Wasn’t Alex Haley obliged to acknowledge that a large section of his blockbuster Roots was lifted from a 1967 novel, The African, by author Harold Courlander?

Why, it’s not so very long ago that Canadians learned former prime minister Stephen Harper’s 2003 speech urging troops be deployed to Iraq was plagiarized pretty much holus-bolus from an address just days earlier by then-Australian Prime Minister John Howard.

The speech writer — who promptly resigned — explained that “pressed for time, I was overzealous in copying segments of another world leader’s speech.”

In an imperfect world where we’re all pressed for time, overzealous copying is bound to happen.

Once again, it’s all in the execution.

When George Bush the elder sought the Republican nomination in 1988, he rhapsodized about America as “a brilliant diversity spread like stars, like a thousand points of light in a broad and peaceful sky.”

But where, you might ask, did a man who lived in prose come up with poetry like that?

Well, from his celebrated speech writer Peggy Noonan, of course. Who may or may not have borrowed it herself.

For it turns out novelist C.S. Lewis wrote in his 1955 novel The Magician’s Nephew (part of the Narnia Chronicles) that “One moment there had been nothing but darkness; next moment a thousand, thousand points of light leaped out . . . .”

Before that, in his 1940 novel You Can’t Go Home Again, Thomas Wolfe wrote: “. . . all between, where 10,000 points of light prick out the cities, towns and villages . . . .”

To some folks, most famously Canada’s own Neil Young, the twinkling and sparkling was all a bit much. He ridiculed Bush’s astral flight by writing in Rockin’ in the Free World that “We got a thousand points of light/For the homeless man/We got a kinder, gentler/Machine gun hand.”

But let us be entirely fair. Not only Republicans are prone to this sort of thing. Robert F. Kennedy is famous for saying: “Some men see things as they are and say, ‘Why?’ I dream things that never were and say, ‘Why not?’ ”

Glorious, isn’t it?

Except that George Bernard Shaw wrote, in Back to Methuselah, that: “You see things; and you say ‘Why?’; But I dream of things that never where; and I say ‘Why not?’ ”

Coincidence, doubtless.

Anyway, Mrs. Trump, as we’ve often said, there’s nothing new under that bright yellow thing in the firmament.

The late British journo Nicholas Tomalin once said the only essential qualities for success in journalism are “ratlike cunning, a plausible manner and a little literary ability.”

Reporters love that line and repeat it with relish.

What’s usually forgotten is Tomalin’s further observation a little later in the same essay.

“The capacity to steal other people’s ideas and phrases — that one about ratlike cunning was invented by my colleague Murray Sayle — is also invaluable.”