What is the Green Party’s game? The question emerges from Ohio’s 12th congressional district, where last night’s special election for an open House seat produced one of Matt Drudge’s classic headlines, “Green Party Space Alien Thwarts Dems.” It links to a Daily Mail dispatch that says the Green Party “spoiler candidate” whose votes “could tilt the outcome says his ancestors were from another planet.”

Save for the physics, it wouldn’t be surprising.

Certainly it’s hard to see an earthly explanation for the Greens’ logic. With all precincts reporting, the Republican is ahead of the Democrat by 1,754 votes. The Green candidate, Joe Manchik, snagged 1,127 votes. Logically, those would otherwise have gone to the Democrat. So the imputed margin would be 627 votes. Something like 5,048 absentee and 3,435 provisional ballots remain to be tallied.

Back in 2000, the Democrats — not to mention the rest of America — were shocked when Governor George W. Bush beat Vice President Gore in Florida by, according to official federal results, 537 votes. Meantime the Green Party’s Ralph Nader won 97,488 votes in Florida. It’s hard to imagine that, had the Green candidate stood down, the Naderite votes would have gone to Mr. Bush.

At the time, Mr. Nader mocked questions about what he’d done by blaming Mr. Gore’s loss on his failure to carry even his home state of Tennessee. True enough, but off the point. At bottom he simply stood on everyone’s right to run, which no one was — or is — disputing. What, though, was the blasted logic? That’s a poser that came into its sharpest relief after the vote in the 2016 election.

At the time we wrote about it in an editorial headlined “Green Guilt?” It was focused on the post-election campaign mounted by Dr. Jill Stein of the Green Party for recounts at Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania. In each state, the Greens had racked up more votes than the margin by which President-elect Trump had bested Secretary Clinton. In none of the three states had Dr. Stein won appreciably more than one percent of the vote.

What was her game? President-elect Trump, who has his own bona fides as a student of behavior, set it down as a “scam.” What, though, a hard — and cynical — way to make a buck. Not that we have any quarrel with the result of the Green Party’s campaign of spoilage, including in Ohio. We don’t mind saying that the Sun is no great shakes a psychiatry, and we tend to favor the Republicans who have benefitted from the Green Party’s game.