The problem is that argparse is absolutely gigantic and I guess that's why you couldn't find it easily, but if you had read through the entire documentation (or knew the terms to look for) you would find that the concept of subcommands will probably achieve what you want to do. Here is a very quick and simple example:
import argparse
parser = argparse.ArgumentParser(prog='PROG')
subparsers = parser.add_subparsers(dest='command', help='sub-command help')
parser_create = subparsers.add_parser('create')
parser_create.add_argument('-d')
parser_create.add_argument('-s')
parser_create.add_argument('-t')
parser_delete = subparsers.add_parser('delete')
parser_delete.add_argument('-d')
parser_delete.add_argument('-a')
parser_status = subparsers.add_parser('status')
parser_status.add_argument('-x')
A simple usage:
>>> p = parser.parse_args(['create', '-d', 'what', '-s', 'size', '-t', 'type'])
>>> p.command
'create'
>>> p.d
'what'
>>> p = parser.parse_args(['delete', '-d', 'what', '-a' 'now'])
>>> p.command
'delete'
>>> p.a
'now'
Of course, check out the documentation for all the details, like using dest to give it more meaningful names (which you can see being used with the add_subparsers call in the example).