Gov. Eliot Spitzer, who repeatedly had pronounced that everything would change "on Day One" with his inauguration on Jan. 1, 2007, has fallen. And he's not getting up again.

The short of it is that he got caught on federal wiretaps with his pants down, arranging complex trysts at the tony Mayflower Hotel in Washington, D.C., with astoundingly high-priced New York City hookers.

But the revelations that he engaged the services of prostitutes ain't the half of it.

The investigation that revealed Spitzer's apparent involvement reportedly began with a federal tax inquiry into suspicious financial transactions. As reported by The New York Times, a bank had reported Spitzer's transactions to the Internal Revenue Service. The IRS concluded the governor was trying to hide the movement of money by funneling the money through the bank accounts of phony companies he had created.

That is to say, he was laundering his own cash, which presumably also belongs to his wife, Silda Wall Spitzer.

The money from those phony accounts was then wired into other shell companies controlled by the alleged prostitution ring, the principals of which have been arrested and charged with federal crimes related to the sex trade.

Mind you, Spitzer is not just a well-heeled john - charged with no crime, but of public interest for mere gawking value. Nor is he "just" a governor implicated in a scandal as a client known to be sometimes difficult with prostitute and sometimes to request dangerous. He is quite decidedly the self-righteous crusader against not just illegality, but against "wrong" more generally and, most importantly, quite personally defined by him.

From his crusades against Wall Street traders and tycoon as attorney general to his conduct of the governorship, Spitzer has crafted both his career and political persona on a reputation for rigorously pursuing the right thing on behalf of the public and entertaining no quibbling over circumstances or parsing of statutory language.

As attorney general of the state of New York, Spitzer prosecuted prostitution rings brought down with the state's organized crime task force. As the Times recounted, Spitzer in 2004 "spoke with revulsion and anger" in announcing the arrest of 16 people allegedly connected to a high-end prostitution ring on Staten Island. "This was a sophisticated and lucrative operation with a multitiered management structure," he said. "It was, however, nothing more than a prostitution ring."

Spitzer's wife is reported to be among a minority of advisers who on Monday urged her husband not to resign. With all due respect to Mrs. Spitzer, her husband's relationship to prostitution is as distinctly a public matter for the Empire State as it is a private matter between her and her husband.

What she does with her marriage is her business. But what Eliot Spitzer does with the governorship is very much the people's business.

Neither forbearance on her part nor even her absolution of her husband for these transgressions is material to the public matter at hand.

The hypocrisy of Eliot Spitzer's life, as now revealed, is insufferable. The conflict between his public career and his private conduct are irreconcilable.

He must immediately resign.