By L.P. LUPO

WASHINGTON, D.C. — A heavily “progressive” county in a heavily Democratic state, with Democrats in full control of the voting machinery and the polling places, screws up the computer voting machines in the primary and runs out of back-up paper ballots, so that Democrats have to vote on toilet paper.

Is this an act of God, stuff happens, an unfortunate situation or an insidious, Republican-led conspiracy, such as Florida in 2000 and Ohio in 2004?

In Montgomery County, Md., where a comedy of errors led to the voter meltdown last Tuesday, the answer is a subdued one.

County Executive Douglas Duncan has announced an obligatory investigation into the snafu, and the heads of county-election officials can expect at least a mild rebuke.

Not surprisingly, there is no outrage, no allegations of disenfranchising minorities and poor people, no allegations of intentional voter suppression, no allegations of fraud, no talk of discrimination and racism and no demands for a recount or, better yet, a re-vote.

That is because it is all among friends. Embarrassing, perhaps, but evil, hardly.

It obviously takes Republicans to create evil in elections, and nary a Republican can be found in ultra-liberal Montgomery County, which is buffered by leftist Prince George’s County to the east and the one-party Democratic rule of Washington, D.C., to the south.

Apparently, if the election does not result in a Bush presidency, no amount of incompetence or voter inconvenience is worthy of the shrill conspiracy rhetoric of the left.

The Democrats’ treatment of the Montgomery County primary voting fiasco is Exhibit A of the left’s infantile fantasies regarding Republican wrongdoing in Florida and Ohio.

Yet the myth-making about Republican vote-tampering endures in Florida and Ohio, even after independent study after study have shown that there was nothing amiss in either state.

Truth is no defense to the Democrats’ higher reality.

Their convenient myths have fueled all manner of outrage among even mainstream Democrats about the illegitimacy of both Bush’s 2000 election and 2004 re-election.

Montgomery County 2006 should be the last word to confirm the demagoguery of Democrats over Florida 2000 and Ohio 2004.

But then, we knew of the left’s altered reality all along.