Do you know how you can tell that Stanley McChrystal is an honorable man? Because within hours of learning about the Rolling Stone piece that ultimately sealed his fate as commander in Afghanistan, he took responsibility for what he and his aides were quoted as saying and apologized. He didn’t equivocate. He didn’t blame reporter Michael Hastings. He didn’t throw his staff under the bus. And he didn’t downplay what he had done. His first instinct was the instinct of an honorable man. That’s how you can tell, when everything is stripped away, who McChrystal is at his core.

The people around him, who jokingly refer to themselves as “Team America,” need to follow their commander’s intent. Because here they go, days after the final reckoning, to Washington Post reporters to anonymously slime Hastings as unscrupulous. It’s pathetic how flimsy their case is: I was a factchecker for two publications, and no factchecker is obliged to inform a source about the slant of a piece. At the absolute most, Hastings is guilty of taking what reporters Rajiv Chandrasekaran and Karen DeYoung charitably term “minor liberties” with his source material. Worse, it’s disgraceful that Team America would even mount a case against Hastings after their boss owned up to the article. Tellingly, not a single one of them would even lend his name to these accusations. I have a ton of respect for Chandrasekaran and DeYoung, and I’m genuinely surprised they would print this cowardly and transparent score-settling.

The circumstances that brought McChrystal down are tragic. McChrystal is an American hero — Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, and who knows how many other murderers, will kill no more innocent people because of Stanley McChrystal — who gave his all to turn around a faltering war and orient it in a more humane direction. It compounds the tragedy that McChrystal has to leave Afghanistan before his strategy can be fully assessed. If it turns out to go well, the credit will go to Gen. Petraeus; if it continues to deteriorate, then McChrystal will reap the blame and the inevitable narrative will include the line that Not Even Petraeus was able to mitigate McChrystal’s alleged errors. (On Camp Nama: there is reasonable basis for a further inquiry as to what McChrystal knew and when he knew it. There is not a reasonable basis to conclude ahead of such inquiry that the man sanctioned torture. And he apologized for Pat Tillman.) It’s a goddamn shame that this is the episode that ends his military career. But McChrystal took it like a man — no excuses, no obfuscations, nothing but honor.

I understand that McChrystal’s staff love him and want to protect his reputation. But their actions and their judgment right now vindicate what Hastings observed in Paris. For the sake of an honorable man, they should follow their boss’s example.