The late news is that Senator Franken is denying reports earlier in the day that he is going to announce Thursday his resignation from the Senate. Instead, in the face of allegations of sexual harassment, he’s gone home to talk to his family. We, for one, hope the family of the junior senator from Minnesota tells him to slow down and hold out for a hearing in the Ethics Committee. There will, if he’s guilty, always be time for him to quit.

It is shocking to us that, according a report in the New York Times, more “more than half” of the Senate’s Democrats, including the caucus leader, Chas. Schumer, have called for Mr. Franken to resign his elected office before any kind of official finding. This emerged after a sixth woman accused the junior senator from Minnesota of having made an improper advance on her before he acceded to the senate.

Yet Mr. Franken has denied at least some of the charges, including the latest. Why are the Democrats in such an all-fired rush? We carry no brief for the former funnyman, though he’s a liberal of the first water. Neither do we have any desire to understate the incidents and culture of sexual harassment that have, for good reason, shocked the nation. We comprehend that we’re in an important moment.

We would go so far as to say that we share the hope that out of this moment will come a better behaved, more equal and — we would add — more chaste society. We understand that in politics there is no right, in the constitutional sense, to “due process.” There is, though, a logic to some kind of process. That was acknowledged, in the case of Congressman Conyers, by no less a figure than a former speaker, Nancy Pelosi.

Mrs. Pelosi has reportedly changed her mind, though Mr. Conyers continued to deny the charges mounting against him. He did quit, this week. Maybe he was guilty or maybe the pressure proved too much for him. (He checked into a hospital and then sent a letter abandoning the legislature in which he’d served for more than half a century.) The voters of Michigan aren’t going to get so much as a howdy-do.

All the greater the logic of Mr. Franken holding out for a hearing. “While he’s entitled to an Ethics Committee hearing,” Senator Gillibrand is quoted by the Times as saying, “I believe he should step aside to let someone else serve.” Why? If he’s entitled to a hearing, why should he not wait for the results? That would be, in our view, better if he’s innocent, better if he’s guilty, and better if the facts are ambiguous.

Millions — men and women — are hoping that out of this moment there are going to come better social mores and even better laws. It’s hard, though, to see how attaining them is going to be advanced by running the accused in individual cases out of public life without any more due process than a cabal of Democrats telling them to go. Mr. Franken could make a coda of his career holding out for this principle.