how to disable comments links on comments.php

I am setting up a blog that will have commenting disabled for most posts. I’ve installed Smart Comments Plugin V. 2.0 (laihiu.nicesoda.com/2005/11/01/post378) and that is dealing nicely with the index.php

I’ve just spent a fair amount of time figuring out how to get rid of any mention of comments in comments.php for posts that have comments disabled. There are a number of posts that talk about how to do this on the index.php of the theme folder but I have been unable to find anything about altering comments.php. After staring at the various smart comments fixes for index.php, I finally came up with something that isn’t too horrible, although it’s probably code heavy… (I outlined what I did at the end of this voluminous post)

There is only one thing left to implement but not really knowing that much about php, I have no idea how to go about it: there may be cases that comments are enabled for a time and then disabled. How do I place a note saying “comments are now closed” on those posts? (I hope my question made sense.

-ejm

P.S. This is what I’ve done so far:

In themes/Classic/comments.php I FOUND

<?php else (comments_open()) : // If there are no comments yet ?>
<p><?php _e('No comments yet.'); ?></p>
<?php endif; ?>

and REPLACED it with the following:

<?php elseif (comments_open()) : // If there are no comments yet ?>
<p><?php _e('No comments yet.'); ?></p>
<?php else : // If comments disabled ?>
&nbsp;
<?php endif; ?>

I FOUND

<?php else : // Comments are closed ?>
<p><?php _e('Comments are closed.'); ?></p>

<?php endif; ?>

and REPLACED it with the following:

<?php elseif ( comments_open() ) : // Comments are closed ?>
<p><?php _e('Comments are closed.'); ?></p>
<?php else : // Comments are disabled ?>
&nbsp;

<?php endif; ?>