I think I understand why there is so much confusion -- my purpose was not to use a third party tool specifically for editing the data, it was because I already have numerous CSV files created by Excel or by export from another radio. I wanted to use one of these files to get my initial channel list into the new KG-UV8D without having to type in the data one row at a time.
That's where I started having trouble. As you say, those files did not contain the extra commas for the empty columns and that is why I got errors right off the bat. After deleting the extra columns (I just deleted the header text) and then Chirp was able to read and import the file without the mismatched column numbers error. Then I discovered that other fields must have a default number in it even if not used (rToneFreq for instance. I fixed that and now all is good.
Regards, Chris W7CFN