Mayor Bloomberg famously fired a city employee found to be playing games during a work shift on city-owned computer in a city office. So what’s he going to do about that devastating editorial in yesterday’s Wall Street Journal about the smear published in the medical journal “The Lancet” that radically, and for political reasons, exaggerated the casualties in the Battle of Iraq? For it turns out, although the Wall Street Journal didn’t make an issue of it, that the Lancet hatchet job, which was exposed by the National Journal, was authored by two professors at — wait for it — the Bloomberg School of Public Health at Johns Hopkins University.

The school is named for our mayor and potential presidential candidate, and it is from the association with his name that the school gains much of its stature. If Mr. Bloomberg is to be honored for his philanthropic generosity, as he often is, and justifiably so, the flip side is that he will also be held accountable when institutions of which he is a major funder veer off track. The fact is that “public health” is one of those areas that is particularly open to ideological and political abuse, and the National Journal and the Wall Street Journal have aired a particularly rank example. So it’s going to be highly illuminating to see how the mayor reacts to this attempt to use his money to undermine our war effort while our GIs are in battle overseas.