In this space last week, we expressed our deep disturbance by the incursion into the White House by an armed fence jumper.

And we expressed hope that a Congressional committee investigating would get to the bottom of it.

We were too soft.

Details revealed during Tuesday’s hearing, and in a series of articles by The Washington Post, exposed the appalling ineptitude of U.S. Secret Service Director Julia Pierson and the agents entrusted to protect the life of our nation’s president and his family.

We learned that the fence jumper not only bolted through the front door of the White House, but raced through several rooms on the main floor before being subdued outside the Green Room by an off-duty agent who, by happenstance, was at the White House.

Ms. Pierson also failed to disclose to the committee that, three days before the fence-jumper incident, an armed security guard with three convictions for assault and battery was allowed on an elevator with President Obama during his trip to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta.

The agency’s incompetence in handling security for President Obama goes back nearly to the start of his presidency, with the party crashers at the first White House dinner in 2009.

And recent reports offered shocking details from 2011 of a man using a semiautomatic rifle who fired several shots at the White House from his car stopped on Constitution Avenue.

Several rounds struck the White House, where President Obama’s daughter, Sasha, and his mother-in-law, Marian Robinson, were in residence at the time.

The Secret Service failed to do a full sweep of the White House and, instead, tried to explain away the gunshot sounds as the backfiring of a nearby construction vehicle or gunfire between two rival gangs.

The incident would have been swept under the rug but for a housekeeper who discovered broken glass and bullet holes on the Truman Balcony. President and Mrs. Obama weren’t informed until four days after the shooting. They reportedly were furious.

Ms. Pierson said the Secret Service is 550 people below its optimal staffing. That’s no excuse for the agency to act more like the Keystone Cops than the nation’s elite protective unit.

Ms. Pierson resigned Wednesday. But she should have been booted out a long time ago. She had 16 months to whip the Secret Service into shape after highly publicized reports of agents’ drunken debauchery in Colombia, embarrassing incidents with prostitutes in Thailand and a rendezvous at a Washington hotel room where an agent left a bullet behind.

In a nation reeling from the overzealous brutality of police against African-Americans in cities stretching from Los Angeles to Ferguson, Mo., to Greenville, S.C., where are the authorities when it comes to protecting President Obama?

Top priority must be placed on finding the best person to lead the Secret Service so that the president and his family will not be placed in jeopardy.