Washington ? Idaho Sen. Larry Craig has infuriated his GOP colleagues by deciding he may stay in office if he can undo his guilty plea to men’s room sex charges.

“If he comes back, he’ll be a leper and a pariah,” a top party operative complained Wednesday. “This is the ultimate in personal arrogance.”

The conservative Republican had said he intended to step down by Sept. 30 after news broke of his encounter in a Minneapolis airport bathroom.

“I thought he made the correct decision, the difficult but correct decision to resign,” said the clearly unhappy Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell after speaking with Craig on Wednesday. “That would still be my view today.”

Craig, 62, called McConnell to say he’ll stay in office to fight a Senate ethics investigation if a judge will let him withdraw his guilty plea.

If Craig can manage the tough task of reversing that plea, he’d be trashed politically anyway, observers said. GOP officials declined to express their unhappiness on the record, but many said he should just go.

Craig apparently decided to fight after Sen. Arlen Specter, R-Pa., suggested Sunday the case against him is weak.

“It’s virtually impossible for an objective observer not to conclude that the senator was in that bathroom cruising for gay sex,” said Bryan Fischer, of the Idaho Values Alliance. “By his reconsideration, he’s extended the shelf life of this thing.”

Craig won support from the unlikely figure of Bill Clinton, a man Craig attacked repeatedly when Clinton was president, at one point calling him a “naughty boy.”

Clinton told CNN’s Larry King he felt no joy to see one of his tormentors destroyed and exposed as a hypocrite.

“I don’t like to see a person suffering from a self-inflicted wound that comes (from) the inability to resolve some conflict in his or her life,” Clinton said. “I mean, that is something everybody has to deal with. And to see it played out in public is painful to me. I didn’t enjoy it at all.”