Facing increasing criticism in a scandal over emails to his secretary, Harris County DA Chuck Rosenthal has withdrawn his candidacy for a third term in office.

Harris County District Attorney Chuck Rosenthal pulled the plug on his re-election campaign after all Wednesday at the climax of a day of flip-flopping, intrigue, political pressure and clock management.

The local Republican Party officially accepted his one-sentence withdrawal letter three minutes before the deadline for removing candidates from the March 4 primary ballot — and three days after Rosenthal had defiantly vowed to run and win despite a scandal over intimate e-mails he sent to his executive secretary, Kerry Stevens.

The action means Harris County, the nation's leading jurisdiction for sentencing murderers to death by injection, will get a new chief prosecutor next January after eight years of service by Rosenthal. He plans to serve the remainder of his current term through 2008, officials said.

Now this withdrawal triggers a somewhat obscure provision of state election law, which extends the filing deadline for office until Friday (it had been set to close at 6:00PM on Wednesday). This will give candidates time to file to run against the one other individual who did file, Houston attorney (and former ADA) Jim Leitner, who came in third in the 2000 primary won by Rosenthal. At least one other candidate from that race, former judge Pat Lykos, is considering a run -- as are several ADAs from Rosenthal's staff.

But it appears that there may be something more than the disapproval of the public at work in this decision.

Minutes after Rosenthal's announcement withdrawing from the race, a federal judge scheduled a hearing for this month where Rosenthal will likely be asked to explain how more than 2,000 of his e-mails got deleted over a weekend. Lawyers for the plaintiffs in a civil rights lawsuit against the county have asked U.S. District Judge Kenneth Hoyt to either sanction Rosenthal or hold him in contempt.

In a sworn deposition last month, Rosenthal denied any wrongdoing.

The missing e-mails were later salvaged and given to the plaintiffs' lawyers, records show, but Rosenthal's information technology director couldn't assure them that no e-mails were overlooked.

This issue alone is reason enough for Rosenthal to be rejected as a candidate. More to the point, this issue could well lead o his being disbarred or even jailed . There is no place for such Clintonesque behavior on the part of a public official, and I believe that Rosenthal's resignation may be in order, depending upon the evidence brought to light in this upcoming hearing.