  The discovery of a Higgs particle is possible in a variety of search channels
at the LHC. However the true identity of any putative Higgs boson will at first
remain ambiguous, until one has experimentally excluded other possible
assignments of quantum numbers and couplings. We quantify to what degree one
can discriminate a Standard Model Higgs boson from "look-alikes" at, or close
to, the moment of discovery at the LHC. We focus on the fully-reconstructible
"golden" decay mode to a pair of Z bosons and a four-lepton final state,
simulating sPlot-weighted samples of signal and background events. Considering
both on-shell and off-shell Z's, we show how to utilize the full decay
information from the events, including the distributions and correlations of
the five relevant angular variables. We demonstrate how the finite phase space
acceptance of any LHC detector sculpts the decay distributions, a feature
neglected in previous studies. We use likelihood ratios to discriminate a
Standard Model Higgs from look-alikes with other spins or nonstandard parity,
CP, or form factors. For a benchmark resonance mass of 200 GeV/c^2, we achieve
a median expected discrimination significance of 3 sigma with as few as 19
events, and even better discrimination for the off-shell decays of a 145
GeV/c^2 resonance.
