There’s a standoff in Idaho over former Gov. Dirk Kempthorne’s gubernatorial records, which remain in the custody of the state Department of Administration rather than the Idaho State Historical Society.

Kempthorne, who left office in May 2006 when President Bush appointed him Interior secretary, says the society has not requested the records. Linda Morton-Keithley, administrator of public archives and the society’s research library, says it has.

It doesn’t much matter who’s correct. Two years ago the state attorney general’s office issued Kempthorne a directive to transmit the records of his 7 1/2 years as chief executive to the society, where they could be accessible to historians, journalists, lawyers and citizens at large. The records are, after all, a product of the service Kempthorne performed on the public’s behalf.

The former governor’s lawyer now says some of those documents might be exempt from disclosure and the past 24 months haven’t been enough time to vet them to make sure that legitimately secret papers aren’t released inadvertently. But Kempthorne seems to have a bias toward secrecy. His first instinct upon leaving Boise was to turn the records over to the University of Idaho to be sealed for 25 years. That’s what he did with the records from his term in the U.S. Senate.

As the state attorney general’s office informed him, however, Idaho law has more respect for the “public” aspect of public records than federal law does. Sealing his gubernatorial papers for a quarter of a century would be illegal.

Meanwhile, the former governor does have time to vet the records on a case-by-case basis. He decides who can see what as requests come in.

That is not what “open records” means. And although a spokeswoman in Kempthorne’s current federal agency says the ex-governor’s representatives are trying to negotiate a resolution, open records aren’t supposed to be negotiable, either.

Idaho’s Lt. Gov. Jim Risch understands that. He took over as governor during the final seven months of Kempthorne’s term, serving admirably and delivering his own gubernatorial records promptly to the historical society.

That approach, Risch noted, avoids the suspicion that an official is up to something sneaky, and, even more important, it makes sure the citizens of a self-governing society can keep an eye on what elected officials and the bureaucracy do.

Kempthorne should be entitled to a reasonable amount of time to screen the records compiled during more than seven years in office, but if he shared Risch’s attitude about governmental transparency, two years would have been more than enough.