Stock CiviCRM on Ubuntu package of Wordpress leads to /var/lib/wordpress/var/lib/wordpress/ paths
I don't feel that this is a good solution to the problem, but as requested, I'm reposting this as an answer. I "solved" this error by creating a symlink using:

$ mkdir -p /var/lib/wordpress/var/lib

$ ln -s /var/lib/wordpress /var/lib/wordpress/var/lib/wordpress