What does the future hold for New York’s police commissioner, Raymond Kelly? On the one hand, the local papers suggest that he’s been in a rough patch, with the arrest of some officers for gun running and some others for fixing parking tickets. Some of the protesters of Occupy Wall Street complained of rough handling by the NYPD. On the other hand, even his critics concede he’s been one of the greatest police commissioners in history, and many New Yorkers are hoping he’ll run for mayor. Mr. Kelly has been remarkably consistent in telling his friends privately that politics is just not in his DNA.

So why not compromise and make Mr. Kelly director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation. The thought arises in the wake of the latest example of how the NYPD has scooped the FBI in a terrorism case. This one involves the arrest of Jose Pimentel, who was infatuated with al-Qaeda and was allegedly preparing pipe bombs as part of a plan to blow up government buildings and attack veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan here in the city. The mayor announced the arrest on the Sunday before Thanksgiving. Mr. Kelly described Mr. Pimentel’s situation as a “classic case” of a “lone wolf” in which the city had to act.

No sooner had the arrest been announced than stories started showing up in the papers suggesting the FBI had looked at it and given it a pass. One report in the New York Times, co-written by a former reporter of the Sun, Joseph Goldstein, disclosed that several persons who’d been briefed on the case said that some of the incriminating statements uttered by Mr. Pimentel were made after he’d smoked marijuana with a confidential informant. A “federal source” cited by the New York Post characterized Mr. Pimentel as a “stoner” who was, as the Post characterized it, “not a real danger to anybody other than himself.”

That Mr. Kelly went ahead with the case suggests that he’s got the kind of judgment one wants in a top lawman in the middle of an exceptionally dangerous war being fought in the twilight of terror. This seems to be understood by even Mr. Pimentel’s mother, an immigrant who clearly is mortified at the trouble into which her son has fallen; she has apologized to the city. It’s maddening to New Yorkers to read of how the FBI deemed the case beneath its standards. Particularly because, according to an illuminating dispatch by Judith Miller in the Wall Street Journal, the FBI was briefed on the case all along.

It starts to look like a case in which the local office of the FBI failed to alert Washington, where the political leaders don’t like being caught flat-footed. In any event, the right way to react is for the FBI, and the rest of the country, to recognize the resources that have been built up in the NYPD and the judgment that has steered it to a pre-eminent position in the current war. The department has a famously deep bench of foreign-born officers fluent in two or three languages. It’s a resource the NYPD has long been willing to make available to help other law enforcement agencies.

By our lights, it adds up to an opportunity for President Obama or whoever succeeds him. The director of the FBI, Robert Mueller, is now on a two-year extension of his term, given that Mr. Obama didn’t want to switch FBI directors while he was shaking up the rest of the defense and intelligence leadership and installing Secretary Panetta at the Pentagon. Understandable enough. But that transition has been made. We haven’t asked Mr. Kelly about whether he might be interested in the FBI, but it strikes us that he would be the logical man if the question is who is the best possible leader for an FBI that deserves to be making the arrests, rather than carping anonymously about the arrests made by the NYPD.