The sex scandal around the president of Israel, Moshe Katzav, is rapidly turning from melodrama into farce. It makes one wonder whether Israel needs a presidency at all.

The latest divertissement in the sad comedy of Mr. Katzav, who has been clinging to his office as to a life raft ever since the first accusations of sexual improprieties committed with women on his staff were first made against him several months ago, is his request to be given an official one-day leave of absence by the House Committee of the Knesset so that he can be excused from attending the swearing-in later this week of Supreme Court chief justice, Dorit Beinish.

According to Israeli law, the chief justice of the court has to take the oath of office in the presence of the country’s president. Yet since the country’s president is currently being investigated on multiple charges of sexual harassment and possibly rape, he has been trying to make himself as scarce as possible. For him to preside over Ms. Beinish’s swearing-in would be an embarrassment to everyone concerned — and yet since the law requires him to be there, the only way to get around it is for the Knesset committee to vote him temporarily out of commission while he sits twiddling his thumbs in the presidential mansion fifteen minutes away by car from the Supreme Court building.

The saddest part is that by now it is clear to everyone but Moshe Katzav himself that he will be forced to quit in disgrace, and that his one chance to save a small part of his honor, which was to have resigned of his own accord with as much dignity as he could have mustered, has already been lost. The argument put forth by him and his lawyers that he should be allowed to stay in office because he is innocent until proven guilty is so absurdly insensitive to the public dimensions of his case that it itself is a good reason why he must go.

Mr. Katzav, after all, is not a private person struggling to clear himself of charges he claims are baseless. He is the supreme representative figure of the state of Israel, and as such it hardly matters whether he is guilty or not. Even if he eventually is declared to be legally innocent by his police investigators or the courts, Israel deserves to be represented by someone other than a man alleged by more than one former staff member to have made improper advances to her. The mere absence of a criminal conviction on one’s record is not, as he seems to think, sufficient qualification for being a country’s president.

But if truth be told, Mr. Katzav does not have many other qualifications. He is Israel’s eighth president, and even before the current scandal broke around him, he was the most undistinguished and lackluster of the lot. A Likud politician with a pleasant manner, sweet smile, and no notable accomplishments to boast of, he was chosen by the Knesset in the year 2000 as part of a right-wing effort to block the candidacy of Shimon Peres. A cynic might have said that he was awarded the job because he was the one senior figure in the Likud considered by his party to be perfectly dispensable.

A list of Israel’s eight presidents resembles a ski slope — it runs steadily downhill. The country’s first president, Chaim Weizmann, was a towering figure in the history of Zionism. Presidents 2 and 3, Yitzchak Ben-Zvi and Zalman Shazar, were charter members of the socialist-Zionist pioneering movement and genuine intellectuals and respected authors. Presidents 4-6, Ephraim Katzir, Yitzhak Navon, and Chaim Herzog, though a cut still lower — one a respected scientist, one a well-liked politician, one an ex-army man and military historian — had a certain stature and presence. Even President 7, Ezer Weizmann, despite an unfortunate tendency to put his foot in a rather big mouth, was a war hero, a key figure in Israel’s peace negotiations with Egypt, and a man of character and flamboyance. Moshe Katzav, it has been said, has a sweet smile.

Why this steady decline? The main one is that Israel’s presidency is strictly a figurehead position with no real powers of any kind, so that once the novelty and allure of being one of the first presidents of a Jewish state wore off, it has not been a job for anyone with more pressing things to do. This was a point made as far back as 1952 by Albert Einstein, who politely and quite sensibly declined the offer to become Israel’s second president on the grounds that it would interfere with his scientific work. And indeed who in his right mind would have preferred to see Einstein accepting the credentials of the Guatemalan ambassador or patting schoolchildren’s heads when he could have been working on his Unified Field Theory?

It has been suggested that Israel abolish its presidency before someone even less suited than Moshe Katzav comes to occupy it, and there is something to be said for the suggestion. Still, even though the president of Israel is not the queen of England, there is a certain comfort in a country’s having a supreme officeholder, whether of royal or plebeian lineage, who, however impotent, stands above the political fray. Perhaps, if someone else could be found to shake the hands of ambassadors and visit schoolchildren, the job might become more attractive again. After all, it pays well and comes with a nice mansion and a good pension — all it lacks is some free time to do one’s work in. With enough of that, even Albert Einstein might have reconsidered.

Mr. Halkin is a contributing editor of The New York Sun.