Templates in Aquamacs

First of all, my apologies if this is not the correct forum for this  
question.  I am a new user of Emacs in general, and have only the  
barest understanding of Lisp, so it may very well be that the answers  
I seek can be found elsewhere and I just don't know how to look for  
them.

I would like to set up Aquamacs such that when I create a new file  
with the extension .tex, the resulting new buffer automatically  
contains the LaTeX preamble (i.e. documentclass definitions, etc.)  
that I use in nearly everything I write.  Currently, I have a file  
called "template.tex" that I open and then immediately rename, but  
I'd like to avoid this step.  This seems like something that should  
be fairly straightforward to implement, but I don't really know how.   
Can anyone point me in the right direction?  There is already some  
set of commands (in AUCTeX?) that generate the following text:

%%% Local Variables:
%%% mode: latex
%%% TeX-master: t
%%% End:

when I create a .tex file.  Can I edit this directly?

Matt Cohen
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