SALEM, Oregon » The allegations swirling around Gov. John Kitzhaber and his live-in fiancie did not seem to bother Oregonians much when they re-elected him last fall to an unprecedented fourth term. But now, with hints of scandal tumbling out almost by the day — about the business dealings of the fiancie, her previous marriage and her role in state government — the reaction has descended into a mix of tittering gossip, outrage and dismay, threatening to tarnish the last years of one of the state’s most enduring politicians.

Kitzhaber, a 67-year-old Democrat in a heavily Democratic state, faces a long list of problems: two petition efforts to recall him, demands for his resignation from various newspapers, and an ethics investigation by the state into the business dealings of his fiancie, Cylvia Hayes. Separately, the Oregon attorney general, Ellen Rosenblum, said Monday that she was initiating a criminal investigation of the couple.

The inquiries stem from contracting work that Hayes, 47, a clean-energy consultant, performed and was paid for while living with the governor and advising him on clean-energy issues. Those issues have long been a priority of Kitzhaber’s administration, but now they are bound up — and perhaps undermined — by questions of whether love and politics got too cozy in the governor’s mansion.

Late Wednesday, amid speculation that Kitzhaber might have had enough, he set the record straight. "Let me be as clear as I was last week, that I have no intention of resigning as governor of the state of Oregon," he said in a statement. "I was elected to do a job for the people of this great state, and I intend to continue to do so."

The deeper trouble, though, is that after 12 years in office, the governor’s enemies and critics — and erstwhile supporters, who think he has simply stayed in office too long — have grown like compound interest over everything from his laid-back management style to the disastrous rollout of the state health insurance website, which never fully worked and cost hundreds of millions of dollars.

And unlike last November, when voting against Kitzhaber would mean electing a Republican, Democrats can now contemplate a change in chief executive without such a risk. Under the Oregon Constitution, the secretary of state, Kate Brown, would take office should the governor not complete his four-year term. And many Democrats are quick to say how much they like her.

Questions and rumors about Kitzhaber’s immediate future intensified on Wednesday when Brown, who was attending meetings in Washington, D.C. and had been scheduled to return to Oregon on Friday, cut the trip short to return home, though a spokesman for her said she had no events on her schedule.

Kitzhaber, a former emergency room physician who rose through the Oregon state Legislature, has mostly remained mum as the controversies swirled. But he said last month in a defiant news conference that he would not resign, and that appearances of impropriety were deceiving.

"Cylvia and I have some areas of common interest — climate change being one, low carbon fuels being one," he said. "We knew there was a gray area and we took intentional steps to try to clearly separate her volunteer activities as the first lady from her paid professional work."

His office did not respond to calls and emails this week, and Democratic majority leaders in the Legislature are saying just about nothing in his defense either.

"I will not speculate on his future," the Senate president, Peter Courtney, said in a statement. "We have a lot to do, and we need to get it done before July. We can’t let anything distract us."

Other Democrats — particularly those who are out of office and thus less gun-shy — have all but called for the governor to step down.

"The governor has said he is not resigning, but sometimes you make a statement like that before you understand how much is at stake in terms of your long-term reputation and in terms of the state — doing what’s right for the state of Oregon," said former Gov. Barbara Roberts, a Democrat who served one term in the 1990s.

"It’s disruptive, it’s disappointing, it’s occasionally shocking," Roberts said in a telephone interview, referring to the news reports coming from Salem, the state capital, over the past few months.

Questions about Hayes began last fall, when she confirmed a newspaper report that said she had married her third husband, an Ethiopian immigrant, for money in a sham marriage in 1997. She said she had been 29, struggling financially, and was paid about $5,000 to marry an 18-year-old man who wanted to stay in the United States.

The marriage — dissolved in 2002 with the couple never living together, Hayes said — was first reported by the Willamette Week newspaper. The revelation prompted her to apologize publicly, not least to the governor himself, who she said knew nothing about it. Marriage fraud is a federal crime, but the five-year statute of limitations had passed.

"It was a marriage of convenience. He needed help and I needed financial support," Hayes said at a news conference in October. "It was wrong then, and it is wrong now."

Willamette Week also suggested in a story that Hayes had used access to the governor for economic gain in consulting contracts for her company, 3EStrategies. And a drumbeat of new questions has continued since. The Oregonian, the state’s largest newspaper, reported last week that two people involved in Kitzhaber’s 2010 campaign helped Hayes find paid work with groups interested in Oregon policy. In an editorial last week, the paper called for the governor’s resignation.

Ross Swartzendruber, 50, an advertising salesman and Democrat who was walking through downtown Salem on a recent lunch hour, said that "Kitzhaber fatigue" had set in among Democrats like him even before the November election. Kitzhaber beat Dennis Richardson, a Republican state representative, by about 85,000 votes out of about 1.5 million cast.

"Oh yeah, they’re fatigued," Swartzendruber said, adding that his own disappointment with the governor had grown over the years, especially regarding education — the state was ranked 41st in the nation in a study last month that examined school funding and student achievement. "There’s a lot of issues he should be supporting that he’s not," he added.

Asked about the possibility of Brown, the secretary of state, becoming governor, Swartzendruber brightened visibly. "She’d be great," he said.

No matter what happens in the next few weeks, an effort to recall the governor is likely to stay on the boil here, as organizers — led by two people who worked for Richardson last year — start to raise money for the effort. Brown, whose office oversees elections, said in a decision last week that the signature-gathering effort itself could not start until at least July, after the governor has been in office for six months. Oregon has no impeachment provisions in its constitution.

But the indignities for Kitzhaber — if only in Oregon residents offering criticism and advice about his personal life — will almost certainly continue.

"I understand about making mistakes in personal relationships," said Robert W. Tormey, 70, a retired schoolteacher who was having coffee in downtown Salem this week. He described himself as a libertarian who had supported Kitzhaber in every election and still admires him.

"I’ve been married and divorced three times, and I like smart women also — and Cylvia Hayes is obviously very smart," Tormey said. "But I have kind of learned the hard way: Don’t mix politics and pillow talk."

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