Every now and then, the Maine Republican Party shows potential as a serious institution.

A recent post on the party’s Facebook page asked two salient and urgent questions:

“If we do not have a large enough young population coming in, who is going to take care of Maine’s seniors who have worked hard their whole lives and deserve a peaceful retirement? If our industry/economy is disincentivizing newcomers, and we are not repopulating well enough, where is this state going to be 15 years from now?”

Sadly, that post — so sensible, so legitimate — was an aberration. Much of what passes for politics among Pine Tree State Republicans these days is reacting with fury to whatever call to outrage is posted by the Maine Wire, a news site catering to MAGA world.

More typical of this group’s online activity was a post that claimed a “leaked top secret” memorandum from the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee showed its “internal strategy” to implement what it called a “Project 2026” agenda.

The National Republican Congressional Committee posted on X that the “top-secret Democrat memo found on [a] DC street” called for a “nightmare agenda” of “higher taxes, open borders, skyrocketing gas prices, no more gas cars, crime in the streets, trans sex changes for kids, and no more freedom.”

“This is their deranged blueprint,” the post read. The memo was bogus, as any sane person could discern from subheads like “Bring Back Wasteful Government Spending” and “More Woke, Less Rational.”

Luckily for the NRCC, most people don’t study the text of long documents on social media. They react to what they see at a glance. The aim here is to mislead voters about what Democrats want.

It’s maddening to see this nonsense taking hold of the Grand Old Party in our state.

Fortunately, not every Maine Republican refuses to engage in rational debate. Maine’s senior senator, Susan Collins, keeps pretending the U.S. Senate is a place for political passions to cool and reasonable policy to emerge. Maybe she believes it. One of the GOP gubernatorial candidates I wrote about recently, state Sen. James Libby of Standish, has a campaign website chock full of policy positions that look suspiciously sensible.

I don’t know how we effectively urge a move away from the stream-of-conscious idiocy that President Donald Trump has injected into contemporary politics. We ought to be talking about our future — seeking answers for the sorts of questions the GOP rightly raised about our aging state, for example — instead of focusing endlessly on “hot-button” issues that resonate mostly with the craziest segments of the electorate.

I have a poster above my desk from a long-ago campaign by former Maine Sen. Margaret Chase Smith. Above her photograph are the words “Responsive and Reliable” in bold type.

Responsivity and reliability sound really good right now. Let’s encourage our representatives and would-be representatives to get serious again — while we still can.