Workman, who has been bound over for trial on two felony charges of misusing public funds, has refused to resign her office or end her re-election campaign.

Since her party believes she is unelectable, it has withdrawn its support of her campaign, throwing it, instead, to write-in candidate Ellis Ivory. Harsh as that may seem to Mayor Workman, the party did the right thing.

The goal of a political party is to pool collective effort to elect like-minded candidates to public office. If the county GOP continued to support Mayor Workman, despite the criminal charges, it risked dragging down its other candidates, particularly those for other county offices.

Mayor Workman insists the criminal charges against her are a political vendetta, and that while she made procedural errors in using health department funds to help pay for a succession of bookkeepers at the South Valley Boys and Girls Club, where her daughter is the chief financial officer, her conduct does not rise to the level of a crime. She may be right. The question of her guilt is a matter for a jury to decide.

But though she is entitled to a presumption of innocence in court, the charges against her will not be resolved before the election. She is asking voters to support her in the hope that a jury will vindicate her side of the story. That's a lot to ask.

She is entitled to continue her effort to win her case and clear her name, but she is not entitled to the unquestioned support of her party, especially when both a bipartisan panel of prosecutors from outside Salt Lake County and now a judge have found that there is sufficient evidence against her to support the charges.

Republicans countywide rallied around her when the Democratic district attorney pursued his investigation, echoing her claim that the probe was pure politics. But sustaining that position became impossible after the preliminary hearing in which a judge ruled that the case against her should be tried.

The GOP's decision to abandon Workman, after she refused to give up her campaign for the good of the party, was pure politics. But in these circumstances, that's not a bad thing. At least it will give voters another candidate with a major-party endorsement to consider.