Air France has several scheduled flights Tuesday evening between New York and Paris. Dominique Strauss-Kahn may well be on one of them, headed home, his three-month trek through the American criminal justice system having come full circle.

THE DAY Clyde Haberman offers his take on the news.

It was on such a New York-to-Paris flight that his journey began in mid-May. He was minutes from being airborne when police detectives yanked him off the plane and returned him to Manhattan to face charges that he had sexually assaulted and tried to rape a housekeeper at the hotel he left hours earlier.

Now, as just about everyone from here to the Louvre knows, the criminal case against Mr. Strauss-Kahn has fallen apart, totally and stunningly. Not because he is an innocent. The evidence is ample that in the space of a few minutes he had a sexual encounter with a woman who had walked into his room, whom he didn’t know, who meant nothing to him. Exactly how that episode came about remains unexplained.

No, Mr. Strauss-Kahn is not an innocent. Maybe if I were French, a word like “cochon” would come to mind. You can look it up.

But to go free, he doesn’t have to be innocent. He merely needs to be not guilty. And in a 25-page motion, prosecutors representing the Manhattan district attorney said on Monday that they had no confidence they could prove Mr. Strauss-Kahn guilty of having forced himself on the woman, Nafissatou Diallo.

Theirs was an interesting document, written in smooth, accessible language, free of the legal mumbo jumbo that often litters such pages. Clearly, it was drafted for an audience well beyond a courtroom, detailing how a criminal case they once called rock solid had devolved into an unholy mess.

The problem, the prosecutors said, lay not so much with Mr. Strauss-Kahn as with his accuser. They said Ms. Diallo, who was not named in their document, had told so many lies on so many crucial subjects — details of the encounter with Mr. Strauss-Kahn, questions about whether she was trying to shake him down for money, abuses that she said she had endured in her native Guinea and elements of her claim for asylum in this country — that her credibility had shriveled.

“If we do not believe her beyond a reasonable doubt,” the prosecutors said, “we cannot ask a jury to do so.” She told so many falsehoods, they said, that “their cumulative effect would be devastating” were she to take the witness stand.

So they asked Justice Michael J. Obus of State Supreme Court in Manhattan to dismiss the criminal charges. The judge is expected to accede to their request on Tuesday. By nightfall, Mr. Strauss-Kahn, who was head of the International Monetary Fund before his arrest, could be flying home to France, where he had been a serious presidential contender.

It is hard to imagine anyone feeling good about this tawdry case.

Fairly or not, Mr. Strauss-Kahn’s career has unraveled. Fairly or not, Ms. Diallo has been labeled a woman of dubious integrity; for all anyone knows, she may yet face deportation. Fairly or not, the district attorney, Cyrus R. Vance Jr., has had his judgment and competence called into question. Ms. Diallo’s lawyer went so far on Monday as to demand that Mr. Vance be supplanted by a special prosecutor — a Hail Mary pass, if ever there was one.

Fairly or not, the justice system itself has been criticized by an assortment of groups, including representatives of women’s advocacy organizations who protested Monday evening outside the Criminal Courts Building in Manhattan.

Yet it could be argued that the system, if flawed, worked as it is supposed to.

A woman of little social status charged that a man of considerable power had attacked her. Instead of dismissing her out of hand, as might have been the case in other societies, the New York authorities sprang into action. They yanked the man off a plane and hauled him off to jail. When her credibility was then deemed to have as much substance as a soap bubble, the authorities decided they had no choice but to let the suspect go.

Do we really want our district attorneys to pursue cases in which they have no faith?

The issue was summed up on Monday by a commenter to City Room who identified herself only as Matilda, from Manhattan. “I hate to say it, but I’m glad that the D.A. is dismissing this sorry case,” Matilda wrote.

She described herself as “a longtime feminist who has long protested violence against women.” But she said, “this was not the case — not the woman — to pin our hopes on.”

For more local news from The Times, including the Manhattan district attorney’s formal motion to drop the case against Dominique Strauss-Kahn and his accuser’s lawyer’s request to remove District Attorney Cyrus R. Vance Jr. from the case; a large increase in allegations of grade-changing and test-tampering by educators under the Bloomberg administration; and a look at New York’s public tennis courts as we near the start of the United States Open, see the N.Y./Region section.

Here’s what City Room is reading in other newspapers and on other blogs this morning.

Deaths from domestic violence increased 10 percent in New York State last year, according to a report by the State Criminal Justices Services Division. The jump appears to have been mostly in the city, with children making up a disproportionately large number of the victims. [Daily News]

A teenager was fatally shot in Fort Greene, allegedly by the father of her 3-year-old daughter after he punched her and she splashed him with bleach. [Daily News] (Also see The New York Post)

The City Council speaker, Christine C. Quinn, spoke out against a large shelter for mentally ill homeless people in Chelsea that has already begun to take clients. [New York Post]

Two insurance executives have filed libel lawsuits against former Gov. Eliot Spitzer seeking more than $90 million in total for a column he wrote on Slate.com. [New York Post] (Also see The Wall Street Journal)

The Feast of Santa Rosalia in Bensonhurst has been canceled. [Brooklyn Daily Eagle]

Politicians spoke out Monday against Michael Pena, a police officer accused of raping a 25-year-old schoolteacher at gunpoint last Friday in Inwood. Mr. Pena contends that prosecutors are trying to make an example out of him. [Daily News]

A building superintendent in TriBeCa has been charged with grand larceny and is accused of selling the works of an artist whose family left the pieces in his care after the artist, ShirleyWest, died on June 8, 2010. [New York Post]

Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg has hired a number of former workers in his administration to work for Bloomberg Philanthropies. [Wall Street Journal]

The National Weather Service has already released a hazardous weather outlook for New York City for Saturday, when what is now Hurricane Irene is expected to reach us. [mcbrooklyn]

A small group of New Yorkers are trying to preserve the Aztec language Nahuatl in the city. [Daily News]

A look at the Bensonhurst venue once graced by the Grateful Dead at 2:30 p.m. on a Wednesday. [Brownstoner]

A photograph of a West End Towers apartment building will be featured on a new Forever stamp. [New York Post]

Photos: demolishing a fine East Village town house. [EV Grieve]