Kimberly Cheatle’s days as director of the Secret Service were numbered from the moment Thomas Matthew Crooks fired his first shot at Donald Trump’s political rally July 13.

Cheatle, whose agency is in charge of protecting high-profile political leaders, faced a barrage of criticism during a congressional committee hearing Monday. She took responsibility for the failures of her people but promised to remain in office. The following day, she resigned.

Cheatle had been with the Secret Service 27 years before taking a security job at PepsiCo. In 2022, President Biden tapped her to be the second woman in history to lead the Secret Service.

One of the reasons Biden gave for choosing her was his experience with her on his own protective detail when he was vice president.

But just because Cheatle had protective experience and just because she was the top official at the Secret Service did not mean she had anything to do with preparations for Trump’s rally.

Failures that allowed Crooks within about 150 yards of the former president with a rifle have come to light. Crooks was identified as acting suspiciously. Police were looking for him. The Associated Press reported this week that local police officers stationed at a building next to the one Crooks fired from left their post to search for him in the crowd; it’s not clear whether they’d have been able to see him climb onto the adjacent building if they’d remained at their post.

Cheatle herself said the building had been identified as a security weakness days earlier. She couldn’t answer why that weakness had not been addressed.

Multiple investigations are under way, and they all have a lot of questions that need to be answered.

That said, we have to recognize that Cheatle is a scapegoat.

Some problems that are coming to light were bad decisions by agents on the ground. She didn’t make those calls. Other problems are systemic, such as communications among responding law enforcement agencies; those problems do rest with Cheatle as the top official.

Still other problems reflect the growth in the Secret Service’s duties. The agency was created to investigate financial crimes. Its role in protecting presidents began after the assassination of President William McKinley in 1901, and protecting former presidents and presidential candidates came after that.

As multiple news stories over the years have shown, financial crimes have increased, and so have the number of people Secret Service agents are called upon to protect. Around Sept. 11, 2001, there were about 15 full-time protectees, according to an AP story; that number has more than doubled since then.

The agency’s staffing and budget haven’t kept pace with those increases. The director of the Secret Service should certainly be requesting the resources she needs to do all of the agency’s jobs, but by the time the budget works its way through higher levels of leadership and through the negotiations of Congress, it’s hard to hold Cheatle responsible for the resources she had available.

With the failure of July 13, someone had to go down, and she was the logical choice.

As the investigations conclude, though, we hope that people who bore more responsibility for that failure will face punishment too.