We’re big believers in public dialogue around here.

We put about 125 letters a week on the opinion pages of The Spokesman- Review. Almost half of the space available to us on these two pages goes to comments from readers. That’s nearly five times as much space as we reserve for staff-written editorials, twice as much as for syndicated columns and two and a half times as much as political cartoons enjoy.

And still it’s not enough, especially in the middle of a political campaign that has ignited incendiary debates at the national, state and local levels.

Yet, for all those thousands of community voices that issue from these pages over the course of a year, it sometimes seems that the variety of topics addressed is relatively narrow. To paraphrase a long-forgotten entertainment critic, they cover a span of issues that range from A to B.

Or, rather, from Bush to Kerry.

Now we find ourselves in a quandary. As this weekend’s pages are being laid out, the volume of leftover letters — those that are processed and verified and waiting only for a copy editor’s keystrokes to place them on a page — is enough to carry us through another week. And some of those letters have already been in our hands a week or more. And by this time next weekend we will have received not only enough new letters to replace those that are published in the meantime but enough to replace them two or three times over.

Don’t get me wrong. This is not a bad thing.

Vigorous public discussion about the issues of the day is good for civic health. And when readers are that eager to use these pages as a gathering place, it affirms The Spokesman-Review as the kind of mediating institution that helps the community work together on public concerns. That’s a role we accept seriously, and humbly.

What would be a bad thing — a horrible thing — is if our flow of e-mail were limited to spam about miracle medications and can’t-miss investment tips.

That would be embarrassing for us, but it would be toxic for a self-governing society that allows itself too few avenues for candid give and take about the public policy decisions that are made in its name.

Still, we have that space problem, and there’s no way around it but to start being more selective than you, or we, are accustomed to.

It wasn’t popular more than a year ago when we lowered our word limit from 250 to 200 words and reinstated a 30-day frequency rule. It annoyed a number of readers when we moved the comic strips Doonesbury and Mallard Fillmore off the op-ed page to capture that space for letters.

And it won’t be popular when letter writers start experiencing the difficult decisions we’re already having to make not to use some letters that would have been published under ordinary circumstances.

But since we have to do it, you’re entitled to know. You’re also entitled to know something about the triage process we’ll use to decide which letters are printed and which aren’t.

For one thing, we’ll cut down on repetition, giving preference to letters that move on to fresh topics once an old one’s been reduced to compost. And, with the help of some pretty good resources, we’ll reject unoriginal letters that circulate on the Internet and get forwarded to us over a reader’s signature.

We’ll favor focused commentaries that offer issue-related details over those that generalize. Constructive letters that deal with solutions will have an advantage over those that boil over with name-calling.

No, we’re not trying to discourage conviction in letters, but there’s a big difference between passionate and shrill.

That said, we’ll do our best to select letters, issue by issue, that preserve the ratio of opinions we receive.

It’s not a process given to scientific precision, however, and while I can promise our decisions will be ideologically impartial, I can predict they will be imperfect.

It would be nice if we could satisfy every contributor, but we can’t. So we will set our sights instead on providing a spirited, enlightening forum that exposes all our readers to diverse and informed opinions about issues that matter.