The resignation — if that’s what it is — of Attorney General Eric Holder signals the end of one of the most divisive tenures in the history of the cabinet. It was no doubt inevitable after Mr. Holder was determined, in a bi-partisan vote, to be in criminal contempt of the 112th United States House. He became the only sitting cabinet officer in history to be so found. He reacted to the contempt finding with more contempt. From that point on his tenure in office was unsustainable.

We don’t mind saying that it is a tragic end to what we, at least, viewed as a promising pick for the highest law enforcement officer in the land. We liked the fact that he was a New Yorker, a brilliant graduate of, in Stuyvesant High, one of the finest schools in the city, and had shown a capacity to take an unpopular stand. He had done, in our view, a fine job when he was deputy attorney general under President Clinton. He was a friend of Israel.

Our editor defended Mr. Holder when concerns were aired over his role in President Clinton’s pardon of the so-called “fugitive financier,” Marc Rich. Mr. Holder had been at the center of the effort to vet that pardon (not that any pardon needs to be vetted by anyone other than the president, given that the pardon power is the least fettered of any presidential power). Writing in the New York Times, the editor of the Sun argued that the pardon of Marc Rich resolved an erroneous prosecution and deserved to be defended.

We mention that to underline that we are not, reflexively, in the anti-Holder camp. All the greater our disappointment in his conduct of his office. His default in the fast-and-furious gun-running case was the kind of thing for which he should have taken responsibility and resigned; to have instead spent years fighting the investigation was shocking and to have allowed it to get to the point of criminal contempt, which is what the House found him to have committed, is a scandal.

More broadly one can lay to Mr. Holder some of the responsibility for the souring of Mr. Obama’s presidency. The eloquent Illinoisan, after all, had been lofted to office on a huge vote. He was the first African-American president. How unifying his presidency could have been. Yet his attorney general spurned, even mocked, the Supreme Court’s civil rights rulings, took a litigious approach to the border states inundated with undocumented immigrants, and aggravated a divided Congress.

We are less concerned with the racial dimension to the Holder story. He may have ignited controversy with his remark that in respect of the discussion of race our country has been a “nation of cowards”; our view is that he wasn’t entirely wrong about that. Neither, though, do we feel that Mr. Holder, in his approach to law enforcement, made effective use of the 13th and 14th and 15th amendments, which are the constitutional cordite in the battle against America’s original sin.

Our greatest civil rights leaders, whether black or white, were at once as tough as nails but also had the ability to engender pride and good feeling in the whole nation. Mr. Holder leaves a trail of contempt and acrimony. The news reports say that his resignation will become effective on the confirmation of his successor. Whoever Mr. Obama choses will say a lot about whether the damage from Mr. Holder’s tenure at Justice can be repaired in time to avoid the controversy spilling over into the election of 2016.