The less-insane wing of the House GOP caucus just made the most insane threat they could have made in the debate over who will be the next Speaker of the House: Give us Paul Ryan, or we’ll quit.

To which I can only imagine the House Freedom Caucus saying, “please proceed.”

“De­pend­ing on how this shakes out, you may see some Main Street mem­bers re­tire,” Republican Main Street Partnership CFO and COO Sarah Chamberlain told the National Journal, “… They’re hop­ing for a Ry­an-type can­did­ate. But if it’s not and it be­comes a huge mess, why be sit­ting here?”

As Rep. Peter King (DW-Nominate: .283) told the Journal, “A lot has been put on hold in both ways—people de­cid­ing to run again, or not run again,” while clarifying that he is personally going to stick around “because you can’t give in.” Likewise, Rep. Charlie Dent (DW-Nominate: .264) said that he is “pre­par­ing as if I’m run­ning for reelec­tion right now,” but that “we’ll see what hap­pens. The next two months are go­ing to be pretty intense.”

These may amount to honest assessments of what life will be like in a House controlled by the practically off-the-charts conservative wing of the GOP caucus (as if they don’t already run the show), but it’s objectively terrible politics. There’s a reason that House arch-conservatives have made life miserable for the Charlie Dents of the party: they want them gone. Threatening to retire only strengthens the same subset of the party that has been giving them fits in the first place.

What they should be doing is leaning in on an idea that Dent himself has floated and now undermined: getting Democratic votes for a coalition speaker. If the less-conservative members of the House at least pretended to take this idea a bit more seriously — if they were anywhere near as willing to flex their muscles as the crazy caucus has proven to be, they could credibly float the idea of Charlie Dent or Ileana Ros-Lehtinen (DW-Nominate: .260) — a deal that would almost certainly require a bill to raise the debt ceiling through 2016 and government funding bills that did not defund Planned Parenthood in order to attract Democratic votes. Given the choice between that and Paul Ryan, the Freedom Caucus would almost certainly pick Ryan.

As I wrote last week, Paul Ryan (DW-Nominate: .586) may be more than conservative enough to be Speaker under normal political circumstances, but that these aren’t normal political circumstances. The philosophical differences in the Republican Party are so vast — and the “repeal and defund the entire government” wing of the Party is so large — that getting 218 of them to agree on one speaker will be about as easy as getting 218 members of the entire legislative body to do the same. By threatening to retire rather than pull back against the off-the-rails extremism of their party, they’re admitting the very defeat their opponents have hoped for.

And you wonder how the GOP let itself go this far off the rails in the first place.

(h/t TalkingPointsMemo)