World Bank President Paul D. Wolfowitz has prompted calls for his resignation by improperly intervening to give his female companion a big bank salary while she was on loan to the State Department and then a foundation.

There were some raised eyebrows and serious reservations when in 2005 President Bush gave Mr. Wolfowitz, then deputy secretary of defense, the post of president of the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development, the so-called World Bank. Mr. Wolfowitz is one of the principal fathers of America's misbegotten, destructive war in Iraq. The American president is more or less given the right to name the incumbent of the World Bank post based on the fact that the United States holds 16 percent, the largest portion, of the voting stock of the institution.

The other shareholders of the bank went along with Mr. Bush's nomination of Mr. Wolfowitz, first, because of the traditional U.S. role in the choice of the president; second, because Mr. Wolfowitz had some qualifications for the job, although no banking experience; and, third, because there was precedent for such a nomination. President Lyndon B. Johnson had named Robert S. McNamara, U.S. secretary of defense during another disastrous U.S. war, Vietnam, to the same bank post in 1967.

Mr. Wolfowitz's early performance at the bank wasn't bad, although there were complaints among staff about his practice of making decisions without consulting the bank's experts and other senior officers. There also became some question of whether he worked for the bank or was still working for the Bush administration when he canceled World Bank aid to Uzbekistan immediately after it booted out a U.S. air base on its territory.

The main positive element in Mr. Wolfowitz's program as bank president was an insistence on countries that were beneficiaries of bank programs cleaning up corruption. He put honesty forward as the watchword of his presidency. Now, he has thrown away most of his credibility in that domain by having intervened to give his companion, Shaha Riza, a big, out-of-order, $60,000 raise, putting her new, tax-free salary at $193,590, more than U.S. Cabinet members earn, for example.

Having stripped himself of the personal credibility that the leader of an anti-corruption campaign must possess, particularly the president of the world's most important development bank, there is now no choice but that Mr. Wolfowitz resign promptly.