Arnold Schwarzenegger is the leading Republican candidate for governor in the recall election just five days hence. Anything he does and any discussion of his past is fair game, even if it is not entirely nailed down.

That’s especially true because of the compressed time frame of the special recall election. In just a few weeks, the bodybuilder-turned-actor-turned-political-hopeful has managed to pull ahead of the other 134 candidates with very little scrutiny. Late scrutiny is better than no scrutiny at all.

Furthermore, the Los Angeles Times is a reputable source of news, consistently rated as one of America’s very best. The article says Times reporters spent seven weeks compiling the stories of the women, and that the story did not originate from the campaigns of any of his political rivals. That means the story can be trusted.

To ignore this story also would be to downplay an issue that affects women across the state, and all over the world. The minimization of sexual harassment charges led the press to hesitate when Anita Hill accused Clarence Thomas of talking dirty to her. If the press had been more vigilant and aggressive, the outcome in his Supreme Court nomination hearings might have been different.

Anonymous sources are a fact of life. The best papers in the country rely on them. Reporters use anonymous sources if and only if they think those sources are telling the truth.

Lastly, Mr. Schwarzenegger is a public figure many times over, and has given up his right to privacy. It is better to err on the side of airing accusations against him than to keep them under wraps until everything is fully vetted. Wait an extra day, and the electoral machinery will have moved one step closer to completion, without a full discussion of the truth. Then we will have done our readers, and the voters of California, a grave disservice.