Ted Stevens, the senior U.S. Senator from Alaska who vowed to resign if his “Bridge to Nowhere” earmark wasn’t funded, is now a convicted felon, less than a week before the election in which he seeks an eighth term. That puts Alaska voters in a terrible bind. He can make it right by announcing as soon as possible that, if he wins Tuesday’s election, he will resign from office by a “date certain” shortly after the ballots are counted.

This is confusing, to be sure, but here is the essential background: Convicted on Monday on seven counts of lying on financial disclosure forms, Stevens has made himself unfit for office by committing transgressions that weren’t mere bookkeeping errors. He took what the Anchorage Daily News called “a steady stream of gifts and home improvements” from a man the newspaper described as “a well-known bad actor in Alaska politics long before Ted Stevens collected his first unreported gift from him.”