An analysis of Denton County’s recent party primaries has revealed that something like 2,000 regular Republican voters skipped their own election to vote in the Democrats’, presumably to have some sort of say-so, no matter how small, in that party’s selection of a presidential candidate.

We may assume that they were not trying to help the Democrats out.

The Record-Chronicle’s Dan X. McGraw reported Sunday that 1,975 Denton County voters who had taken part in the last two Republican primaries crossed over on March 4 to vote in the Democratic primary.

Some of those were probably longtime Democrats who normally voted in the GOP primary in order to have a voice in choosing local officials — a Republican primary victory is often tantamount to election in blood-red Denton County.

But a lot of them, McGraw reported, were dyed-in-the-wool Republicans who couldn’t resist sticking their spoons in the Democratic stewpot with a little mischief in mind.

County GOP chairwoman Dianne Edmondson admitted as much, though she made it clear she didn’t approve of the tactic.

Neil Durrance, Edmondson’s Democratic Party counterpart, acknowledged the crossover, but tended to attribute it more to disaffected Republicans than to mischievous ones.

Our own interpretation lies somewhere in between those of Edmondson and Durrance. We think there were probably more disgruntled Republicans than Edmondson was willing to admit to and fewer than Durrance posited, but no matter who’s right, that still leaves a sizable number who simply wanted to gum up the Democratic works.

They were encouraged in this endeavor by conservative radio announcer Rush Limbaugh, who encouraged what he called “Operation Chaos,” a not-so-covert migration of Republican voters to the Democratic primary in order to throw a horse apple into the Democrats’ punch bowl.

Limbaugh’s candidate of choice in this semi-black-bag operation was U.S. Sen. Hillary Clinton, though it’s not clear why. He may have believed that Clinton, as the less liberal candidate, was actually the one that conservative voters should vote for if given a choice between her and U.S. Sen. Barrack Obama. Or he may have believed that Clinton would be the easier candidate for Republican candidate U.S. Sen. John McCain to beat in November.

Or, being the impish fellow that he is, he may have simply wanted to make trouble. We tend toward that theory.

There is no way to tell if “Operation Chaos” resulted in an appreciable increase in Sen. Clinton’s vote total in Denton County. Denton County Republicans tend to dislike her with a remarkable and sometimes irrational intensity, and we somehow doubt that even Rush Limbaugh could entice them to vote for her, even in the name of blowing up the Democratic Party train.

And, as we said, we doubt that Limbaugh cared very much, anyway.

“Operation Chaos” was made possible by Texas’ open primary law, which allows voters to vote in either primary as long as they don’t do it on the same election day. Edmondson doesn’t like the open primary; she believes you should have to register your party affiliation and vote in that primary until you choose to change your registration.

Durrance has no problem with an open primary.

This is what one would expect. The dominant party would normally favor closed primaries while the minority party would welcome all stragglers, even those sent over by Rush Limbaugh.

But that ignores the historical affinity of Democrats for the open primary, even when they were in the majority. There has always been a slight strain of pleasant, “y’all come” anarchy among the Democrats, even when they ruled the roost in Texas. It’s been one of their more endearing traits, we think, and we hope they never lose it. It keeps the door open for last-minute converts as well as giving undercover Republicans a chance for that occasional walk on the wild side.