Special counsel Robert Mueller has sent his gumshoes to Israel. They’re reportedly looking into an Israeli firm that may have led “a social-media manipulation effort” designed to help elect President Trump.

It’s the latest tangent of the sprawling “collusion” inquiry. And the move lays bare a glaring hypocrisy. After all, if the United States wants to investigate meddling in foreign elections, Israel is a great place to look. Just not for the reason Mueller & Co. think.

Just a few years ago in 2015, then-President Barack Obama threw everything he had into an effort to defeat Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s party in Israel’s most recent election. He became only the latest of our Democratic US presidents to do so.

First, Obama — according to The Atlantic’s Jeffrey Goldberg, a close watcher of the Obama team’s Mideast work — tried to “force a rupture in the governing coalition that will make it necessary for Netanyahu to take into his government [Tzipi] Livni’s centrist Kadima Party.”

When that didn’t work, the president went all in. A bipartisan report from the Senate, issued in July 2016, found that taxpayer dollars were involved. The Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations concluded that $350,000 had gone to a group called OneVoice. It obeyed the rules of the grant, intended to support peace.

Once the grant ended, though, the infrastructure and resources “created, in part, from US grant funds” were, said the Senate, used “to support a political campaign to defeat the incumbent Israeli government.”

That campaign was known as “V15,” as in Victory 2015. Its aim seems to have been to elect as prime minister anyone other than Netanyahu. It looked like that was in the bag, too.

Only four days before the election, Reuters reported, the opinion polls showed Netanyahu’s Likud losing to Zionist Union by something on the order of four seats. Why not, with all the help Obama mustered?

Those wily Israelis, though, turned around and elected Netanyahu prime minister anyhow. The Democratic press here in America was in a snit almost as bad as the one that followed the election of Trump.

“Go ahead, ruin my day,” was how Thomas Friedman of The New York Times greeted Netanyahu’s upset. He suggested “facts on the ground” had made “a laughingstock of our hopes.”

In Obama’s defense, interfering in Israel’s elections had almost become a Democratic Party tradition. President Bill Clinton started it in 1996, when he tried to tilt the vote to Labor’s Shimon Peres — also against Netanyahu. This was after Peres’ predecessor, Yitzhak Rabin, was killed by a right-wing assassin bent on stopping the peace process Rabin and Peres had begun.

Clinton failed, and Israelis gave Netanyahu his first term as premier. Netanyahu promptly accepted an invitation from the new Republican speaker, Newt Gingrich, to address a joint meeting of Congress.

That infuriated Clinton. He got his revenge in 1999, when Netanyahu lost a no-confidence vote in the Knesset, precipitating an election that pitted him against Israel’s most decorated war hero, Ehud Barak.

The irony this time was that Democrats almost certainly didn’t need to lift a finger to knock Bibi from office, and it’s debatable whether they deserve any blame for the result. Nonetheless, they sent in the big guns: Democratic pollster Stanley Greenberg and Clinton-campaign mastermind James Carville went to work for Barak. Netanyahu lost in a landslide.

Barak won office after promising never to concede even part of Jerusalem to the Arabs. Once elected, he went to Camp David II and offered up part of Jerusalem for a Palestinian capital.

He was trounced in the next election by Likud’s Ariel Sharon.

Amazingly, it was only this spring that Clinton confessed his surreptitious role in Israel’s 1996 election. “I tried to do it in a way that didn’t overtly involve me,” he told Israeli television.

So every Democratic president in Netanyahu’s career meddled in Israeli elections to depose Bibi.

Which brings me back to Mueller’s mission. Maybe he’ll find the Israeli firm — called Psy-Group — broke American law (a lawyer for one of its principals denied any wrongdoing, the Times reported). And there’s no connection to the Israeli government.

My own view is that if a superpower can’t try to influence elections around the world, what’s the point of being a superpower to start with? If we’re going to interfere, though, how is Mueller’s mission to Israel not the height of hypocrisy?