In this paper, we introduce and study an optimal control problem governed by mixed equilibrium problems described by the sum of a maximal monotone bifunction and a bifunction which is pseudomonotone in the sense of Brezis/quasimonotone. Our motivation comes from the fact that many control problems, whose state system is a variational inequality problem or a nonlinear evolution equation or a hemivariational inequality problem, can be formulated as a control problem governed by a mixed equilibrium problem. There are different techniques to study optimal control problems governed by nonlinear evolution equations, variational inequalities or hemivariational inequalities in the literature. However, our technique is completely different from existing ones. It is based on the Mosco convergence and recent results in the theory of equilibrium problems. As an application, we study optimal control problems governed by elliptic variational inequalities with additional state constraints.