The slow decline of Ehud Olmert’s political career just turned uglier. Yesterday the central committee of Olmert’s Kadima party voted to set primaries for mid-September, an internal election that will almost certainly see Olmert’s replacement as both party leader and Prime Minister, even if there are no national elections. One Kadmia MK referred to him as “a corpse that has has already started to stink and needs to be removed as soon as possible.”

Olmert, for his part, will not go down quietly. According to a report in the Jerusalem Post, in a closed meeting he referred to Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni, one of the leading candidates to replace him, as a “backstabbing liar,” who is the least qualified of the candidates, and who, he a lleges, gave false testimony to the Winograd Commission that investigated the 2006 Lebanon war.

Sources close to Olmert say that he is holding off before announcing he will not run, that he wants to “wait until the last possible moment to announce that he is not running in order to minimize the time that he would be considered a lame duck.” But one has to ask: With such awful blood between the Prime Minister and Foreign Minister, with a super-serious criminal investigation coming to dominate his schedule, with his own party barely surviving repeated no-confidence motions in the Knesset, and with the looming threats of a re-arming Hizbullah, a nuclearizing Iran, and a possible economic slowdown — aren’t we already there? Isn’t it time?