HARRISBURG, Pa. — A Pennsylvania Supreme Court justice caught up in a government porn email scandal stepped down Monday after nearly seven years on the state’s highest court, and a judicial ethics board said it would drop its investigation of him as a result.

The Judicial Conduct Board said it would end its investigation of Justice Seamus McCaffery on a number of matters because the most serious sanctions possible were his removal from office and a prohibition against him holding future judicial office.

His retirement took effect immediately.

The decision followed a disclosure that McCaffery had sent or received 234 emails with sexually explicit content or pornography from late 2008 to May 2012 and an accusation by a fellow justice that McCaffery had tried to coerce him into taking his side against Chief Justice Ronald D. Castille.

McCaffery is at least the fifth public employee – and the highest ranking – to lose his job over the email scandal, which grew out of an internal review by the attorney general’s office into how it handled the Jerry Sandusky child molestation investigation at Penn State. The others, who all resigned, were the secretary of environmental protection, a lawyer in that agency, a state parole board member and a county prosecutor.

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