It’s doesn’t get more astonishing than this in terms of newspaper stories. The case against Dominique Strauss-Kahn is on the verge of collapse, in the wake of the discovery that the woman who accused him has been caught in a number of lies. The New York Times came in with the story the day after an ambitious French minister, Christine Lagarde, was installed as the new director of the International Monetary Fund, where she will move into the office Mr. Strauss-Kahn was forced to vacate on charges that the prosecutors themselves, according to accounts in several newspapers, no longer believe.

It’s too soon to say how all this will turn out. The Times is reporting that the prosecutors and Mr. Strauss-Kahn’s defense team are discussing the possibility of dropping the felony charges against Mr. Strauss-Kahn. But it is attributing much of its story to anonymous sources in law enforcement, as Mr. Strauss-Kahn prepares to go before a judge today. The reason for the meeting today is ostensibly whether to ease the conditions of bail for the one-time front-runner to be the next president of France. Mr. Strauss-Kahn has been wearing an ankle bracelet and confined to an apartment that reportedly rents for $50,000 month and is watched by cameras and armed guards.

On the eve of the hearing, the Times was reporting that the credibility of the accusing woman is in tatters. It quotes two officials as saying the woman “had a phone conversation with an incarcerated man within a day of her encounter with Mr. Strauss-Kahn in which she discussed the possible benefits of pursuing the charges against him.” The Times reports the conversation was recorded, and the man with whom she spoke “had been arrested on charges of possessing 400 pounds of marijuana.”

It also turns out that the man she spoke to in prison is, according to the Times, “among a number of individuals who made multiple cash deposits, totaling around $100,000, into the woman’s bank account over the last two years. The deposits were made in Arizona, Georgia, New York and Pennsylvania.” The newspaper reports that investigators “also learned that she was paying hundreds of dollars every month in phone charges to five companies,” though she’d “insisted she had only one phone and said she knew nothing about the deposits except that they were made by a man she described as her fiancé and his friends.”

There are also other questions. The Times quotes one officials as saying the woman, as the Times put it, “told investigators that her application for asylum included mention of a previous rape, but there was no such account in the application. She also told them that she had been subjected to genital mutilation, but her account to the investigators differed from what was contained in the asylum application.” The Times reports that the lawyer for the woman, Kenneth Thompson, “could not be immediately reached for comment on Thursday evening.”

While it’s too soon to say how it will all turn out, it’s not too soon to think about the implications if the case goes the way it is now pointing. Will Mr. Strauss-Kahn be considered to get his job back at the International Monetary Fund? Not according to the Fund, but should he? Will he be in a position to plunge into the presidential race at France? We have little use for either the IMF or the French left. And France itself, home of the Dreyfus affair, knows all about how major cases can fall apart. But it’s hard to think of a situation quite like this one. The best part of valor for the district attorney of New York County is to cut his losses unless he thinks he can convince a jury that Mr. Strauss-Kahn is guilty beyond a reasonable doubt, something that, at this stage of things, seems a long shot.