Just when Mississippi closed an old and ugly chapter of its history, the book was ripped open again by a legal technicality.

Last year, more than 43 years after the crimes occurred, one man was imprisoned for his involvement in the kidnapping and ultimate murder of two local black men.

Justice was finally served, so we thought.

The 2007 arrest and conviction of James Ford Seale was the latest in a long string of old civil rights era cases reopened and seemingly brought to finality.

Certainly the kidnapping and murders of Charles Eddie Moore and Henry Hezekiah Dee deserved justice.

Their final hours in May 1964 were horrifying. Their mutilated bodies were weighted down and dumped in the backwaters of the Mississippi River — just because they were black.

Last month, Seale’s 2007 conviction was overturned on the grounds that the statute of limitations on kidnapping had run out.

Now federal prosecutors are seeking the full appeals court to consider the case. Success there seems unlikely.

But local officials — who in the 1960s were in collusion with the Ku Klux Klan — may ultimately be able to press charges now.

That may be the only hope to seeing justice served.

We urge federal and local prosecutors to keep this case at the top of their agendas.

No other case deserves aggressive prosecution more than one of a hate-crime, murder and a 43-year evasion of justice.