It’s incredible to us that President Obama has failed to remove Julia Pierson as director of the Secret Service. And, for that matter, Jeh Johnson as Secretary of the Homeland Security, of which the Secret Service is a part. This astonishment grows as details leak out in respect of the failure of security that allowed a “jumper,” who had recently been tooling around with a car full of ammunition, to scale the fence surrounding the presidential mansion and race on foot across the lawn and get inside through the front door.

That was alarming enough. But now the Washington Post reports that the jumper, Omar Gonzales, evaded guards inside the White House and was stopped only at the far end of the East Room. Had he been wearing a bomb, or been carrying the kind of weapons he’d recently had in his vehicle, or been bearing some vial of poison or God only knows what, the scale of the potential catastrophe is ghastly to imagine. It’s the kind of thing over which leaders who place a premium on honor would just offer their resignations. And a president would accept.

We have no personal beef with either Director Pierson or Secretary Johnson. On the contrary, their careers strike us as exemplary. Ms. Pierson, an ex-policewoman, worked her way up through the Secret Service and was elevated to its leadership after the prostitution scandal that erupted two and a half years ago at Cartagena, Columbia. Wikipedia characterizes her assignment in the top post as cleaning up the “image” of the service. Mr. Johnson is widely admired as a brilliant lawyer who was general counsel to the Department of Defense.

These credentials might make sense in peacetime. But now that Mr. Obama himself concedes that our country is back in a war, and with the most nihilistic terrorist organization in memory, it strikes us that a lapse like what is being disclosed at the White House just has to be dealt with at the highest level. What kind of signal would be sent by leaving in place those past whose agencies the intruder managed to get? We need someone at the top like Raymond Kelly — a high-integrity, image-indifferent leader who is obsessed with security.

“The Secret Service does a great job,” Mr. Obama is quoted by the Washington Post as saying. Well, no doubt in some cases. But according to the Washington Post, Mr. Gonzales had been arrested in July at Virginia, where, according to a local prosecutor quoted by the Post, he was “allegedly carrying a sawed-off shotgun, two sniper rifles and several other firearms, as well as a map of the Washington area with the Masonic Temple in Alexandria, Va., circled and a line pointed toward the White House.”

How in blazes can such a man get near the White House fence? The Post quotes Congressman Jason Chaffetz, who chairs a House oversight subcommittee on national security, as calling the Omar Gonzales incident a “failure of leadership.” He is talking about hearings in the House. The first question that needs to be asked is whether the leaders who failed are going to get to keep their jobs or whether the president is going to bring in a new team, starting at the top. It will tell us a lot about how seriously the president and the Congress take security in a time of war.