By this standard, which the prosecution cited in its recommendation to dismiss, it’s hard to see where Mr. Vance went wrong. Was the DA’s office too quick to arrest DSK? At the time, the police had good grounds to believe Ms. Diallo and equal grounds to believe that Mr. Strauss-Kahn, then aboard an Air France jet awaiting departure at Kennedy airport, was a real flight risk.

Was Mr. Vance wrong to subject DSK to a “perp walk”? Commentators in France have called the practice unfair and even barbarous. But it’s standard practice in New York City, and anyway we don’t see what’s particularly cultured about men who have fleeting sexual encounters with hotel staff who happen to enter their room…

We also don’t have much sympathy for the view that DSK has somehow been victimized by the process. His antics would never have survived a day in a modern boardroom—HP’s Mark Hurd and Boeing’s Harry Stonecipher lost their jobs over far less—and should never have been tolerated at the IMF, where he bullied a staff economist into an affair.