Ray Rice -- Will Reportedly Claim TMZ Edited Tape ... Dumbest Defense Ever

Ray Rice will reportedly argue that TMZ Sports edited the "inside the elevator" video ... thereby altering what really happened that night.

He's right. We did edit the video ... and we made that point crystal clear in our original post -- the same post where we also INCLUDED the raw unedited version showing Rice KOing Janay Palmer.

As we initially reported, the original raw video was jerky -- in that it would move forward and then in reverse every couple of frames ... so we removed the reverse frames.

Again, TMZ Sports included the raw video in our original post.