“After much thought and prayer, I have made the very difficult decision to step down from Congress effective January 5th, 2015,” said pugnacious Big Apple Republican Rep. Michael Grimm (R-NY) in a statement released on Monday night. He informed House GOP leadership on Monday that he would resign his seat after pleading guilty to the felony charge of filing a false tax return in connection with a health food restaurant he co-owned. Grimm also admitted to hiding nearly $1 million in receipts from investigators and lying on a deposition. Despite these charges, the two-term congressman had previously maintained that he would serve in office for as long as he was able.

But Grimm had to go. Honor alone demands that someone who has confessed to willfully misleading investigators and defrauding the government cannot continue to serve as a lawmaker without having served his debt. In resigning, Grimm will hold himself to a higher standard than that to which many of his Democratic colleagues hold themselves. It is, however, hard to give him too much credit for this decision. That higher standard — one might even call it a double standard — is demanded of Republicans by a political press that enforces two sets of incongruous rules of conduct.

Grimm is already behaving in a more scrupulous manner than the odious Rep. Charlie Rangel (D-NY) ever did. Despite serving on the House committee tasked with helping to write tax laws, a House ethics investigation found Rangel guilty of failing to pay more than $60,000 in taxes on a property he owned in the Dominican Republic.

“He was accused of failing to declare hundreds of thousands of dollars of personal assets on his financial disclosure forms, failing to pay state and federal taxes on rental income on his villa in the Dominican Republic and helping to preserve a tax loophole worth hundreds of millions of dollars for an oil company at the same time that he was seeking a $1 million contribution to the Rangel Center from a company executive,” The New York Times reported.

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