Monkey around with it:
I'm taking inspiration from the comments, and saying that it's less of a jump to have some sort of primate, like a baboon or relative of a gorilla, evolve size, superficial appearance and new body proportions to fit your model than it is to reinvent the wheel and shift all these factors in a wolf. Especially with the tool and intelligence parts. A lot of hominids coexisted, and the ancestors of these folks could fit into a australopithecine world easily.
I would suggest that since wolf is the functional goal, that you have a parallel evolution of the dog to go with it. Your species could have a long-standing relationship with wolves, to the point that their own evolution has shifted in parallel to mirror their wolf companions. "Domesticate" the wolf early and your species will come to look, act, smell, and communicate more like wolves. In fact, the existence of your species might influence wolf evolution, making them more were-like. Each tribe of werewolves would select for companions that looked more like them, so a "pack" would consist of a matched set of wolf-dogs and werewolves.
I suspect your species won't have the same long-term speed and endurance of wolves, but the wolves can compensate for this, chasing prey and waiting for their "big brothers" to show up and finish off tough opponents.This would also lend itself to the myths of wolves transforming into werewolves, as a wolf pack would seem to spring a werewolf out of it. Tool use and human arrogance would fill in the part where people assume if an animal uses tools, it must be a human as well.
Your werewolves would likely not associate themselves with primates, and instead look at their own appearance and assume they are derived from wolves. Only a modern taxonomy approach and/or genetics lab could prove otherwise. The fact that they really ARE related to humans seems like poetic justice and completes the circle of the werewolf narrative.