It’s so silly. Palpatine ought to have looked in Sith like he did in Clones, and vice versa. That way it would be more believable that he looks the way he does in Jedi.
Indeed. Palpy looks older in AOTC than he does in ROTS. I guess the “lightning deformation” is something Lucas improvised when he wrote/shot ROTS, because he obviously had the primary idea that Palpy was just very old in ROTJ.